These docs describe Fixed Angles and Blendshot, the next update, in development: everything in 1.3 and what it adds. 1.3 is in testing: read its docs.

The panel#

A fixed camera's panel sits under its Transform and reads broad to fine like every Blendable panel: The Shot, Moving, Look And Feel and Entering And Leaving, then Advanced. Each feature is one line, with its switch and a few words on what it's doing now. Copy Or Paste The Whole Fixed Camera, under Advanced, carries one camera's settings to another as a block of text, without any of what every actor carries.

Turn To Follow and Let Them Look Around each draw how far the camera may turn and tilt from the way it was placed, as two rings: one seen from above, one from the side, filled where it can go.

Placing and framing#

Selecting a fixed camera shows Unreal's own preview of its shot. Tip the whole actor to aim it and the tilt goes to the camera alone, so its area stays flat on the floor.

A fixed camera's gizmo and its mark sit in the middle of its area, wherever the camera stands, so the room is where you pick it up. Dragging the gizmo, the mark, the area or the camera moves the whole fixed camera, even when Unreal has picked a part on its own, as a second click on a selected actor does. Turning or sizing a part changes it alone, and the track and any extra shapes added to the area move on their own. To place one: drag it into the room by its mark, size the area, then fly the viewport to the shot and Snap Camera To The View.

Which camera covers where#

In the editor, each area is drawn in pearl, the Fixed Angles colour, with a faint line to its camera that firms up while it's selected, so you can tell whose area is whose in a level of many. The area is drawn over the level, so the parts inside the walls and under the floor keep their colour too. The lines are 5 cm thick; an area's Line Thickness and Shape Color change them.

A camera's Track is drawn only while something uses it, Slide Along A Line or Forward Follows The Track: thick and over the level like the area, with arrows along it for the way forward runs.

In play, tick Draw Camera Stack on the Follow Camera and every fixed camera's area is drawn: bright for the one holding the shot, warm for the one you're standing in while something outranks it, faint for the rest and grey for any switched off. The readout's fixed line names the camera holding the shot, the one whose area you're in, anything it has given way to, whether the stick is being kept, how far the player is looking around and any effects playing. Debugging has the rest of the readout.

Map check#

Build → Map Check warns of a fixed camera:

• with no area to stand in, or only one squashed flat,
• that can't see its own area, even turned as far as Turn To Follow lets it,
• set to Slide Along A Line with fewer than two points on its track,
• set to Forward Follows The Track with fewer than two points on its track.

And of a camera move with no path to travel, one that links your own camera to itself or starts and ends on the same camera, one whose camera isn't in the level, and one with anything in its way, swept as the camera would pass.

Points of interest that place the camera#

Before fixed cameras, a point of interest could take the shot itself, From The Target or From The Point Of Interest. Those two are hidden from new points of interest now, and the ones already using them keep working. Select one's actor and click Convert To Fixed Camera: it becomes a Fixed Camera standing where it put the camera, with its lens, its turn, its blends, its focus and its shake, and an area made from its reach. The point of interest is deleted the editor's own way, which asks first if anything refers to it, and Undo brings it back.

From Python and editor utilities#

Place Fixed Camera Here, Snap Fixed Camera To The View, Convert Point Of Interest To Fixed Camera and Link Fixed Cameras With A Move are editor nodes too, for an Editor Utility Widget or a Python script.