Third Person Crosshair w/Spring Arm [Solved]

I’ve been racking my brain trying to work out how to make a cross hair that performs like the one in the video I’ve linked below (about two minutes in for a decent chunk of what I’m trying to accomplish)

I just cannot work out how to get the cross-hair to move to the direction that the player ship is heading!

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

It looks like it’s a just a billboard on the character pawn with an offset. If you need to have it follow a specific part of the pawn such as a turret you can parent it to the mesh and attach to the turret socket or bone.

Thanks IanLaBrie, I gave it a whirl and it works and follows the direction and rotation of the player etc. But because it’s in the world it’s taking on any camera effects etc I think, so when you move or rotate it becomes a blurred mess on the screen.

Would there be a way to pass the information about where it is on the screen to a UMG widget? I wonder if that would work instead?

Thanks =)

To avoid post process effects and whatnot you can use the experimental 3D Widget. Keep in mind though that even though they have been in a for a while they are still considered “experimental”.

It is possible to set that up through regular UMG Widgets where you’re calculating world space to screen space but I’d still suggest trying the 3D Widget first.

Lastly, you can modify your AA, blur, bloom and whatnot but I believe most of those setting can’t be applied to just one component. Also, when you do test out Screen Space and acceptable-quality make sure you have Resolution Scale to 100% and other things set to “Epic” in your Settings → Engine Scalability.

You’re a champ IanLaBrie, thank you again!

I tried the methods you mentioned but it still was a bit messy, so I tried a combination of different things and came up with a solution that worked.

Using the tutorial here (for placing umg over actors)

In addition to that, I created a new blueprint with only a billboard inside it, out in front of the player where I needed it using the player to parent it in the scene outliner, then assigned the position of that to the UMG widget. Works like a charm =)

Thought I’d post my roundabout solution in-case anyone else comes searching for something similar.