Since early 2024 I have been partially working on a new project at Epic Games: a “proper” camera system¹ for the Unreal Engine, so that anybody can make cool-looking cameras for their games! It came out with UE 5.5 a couple of months ago, albeit in a firmly “Experimental” role, and is somewhat unimaginatively named “Gameplay Cameras”. As I’m working on many improvements and additions for UE 5.6, I figured I would start a developer diary to let anybody interested in cameras know what’s up!

But first, here’s a little trailer video I made, using the Game Animation Sample Project, to hopefully whet your appetite:

About two-thirds of what you see in the video is available in UE 5.5, although the UI and workflow may look different as I improve, fix, and polish things up for UE 5.6. You can find it all under the “Gameplay Cameras” plugin, and there’s even a little bit of documentation on it, even though we usually don’t provide documentation for “Experimental” plugins. Of course, I’ll go into more details into future articles. Just be aware that the version in UE 5.5 is an early look with non-final workflows, missing features, and various limitations that make it, well, “Experimental”, and therefore unsuitable for production.

So far I’ve been working for about a year on this, but as I’m still also working on Sequencer, what you can see in Github at the time I’m writing this article represents maybe six months of that, minus holidays and the like. I’ll continue working part-time between cameras and cinematics for the foreseeable future. If you have questions or feedback about Gameplay Cameras, I’d love to hear it, and my contact information isn’t hard to find… I just won’t guarantee a timely reply! That’s what UDN is for.

If you want to follow along with the next articles in this developer diary, but you don’t want to read any of the other nonsense from my blog, you can limit yourself to the Unreal Engine category of posts.

My new year’s resolution, so to speak, is to try and post developer diary updates for Gameplay Cameras here about once a week. But as someone cleverly said: “this isn’t a promise to you… this is a promise to me“. See you next week! Maybe!

1. Of course there are “proper” camera systems out there, but the Unreal Engine never shipped with one out of the box. ↩︎

My team at Epic Games is looking for a software engineer! We are the Cinematics team inside the Unreal Engine team, and we develop, among other things, the Sequencer tool.