Unreal Engine Camera Offset Issue: Lessons Learned

This article was originally published on April 16, 2021

I’ve been working in Unreal Engine for close to a year now, and there’s been one frustrating issue that I’ve run into several times yet never been able to find any mention of. It’s possible that this is common knowledge and my lack of experience is what’s thwarted me all this time, but I felt it was worth documenting anyways.

The problem is as follows:

Normally, I would click on the camera I wanted to move, and this would show up. Aside from the skewed angle (part of the problem explained in a minute), this is about what it’s supposed to look like.

However, here you can see that when I click on the camera the tool appears way off to the side of it. This causes issues in several ways. One being that the camera now rotates around that point instead of being able to turn it normally, and another being that if you had a keyed out path beforehand, it will be completely offset.

Whenever this happened before, I’d have to delete the camera and start over, no matter how far into the sequence I was, just because I didn’t know any better. I just happened to realize what I did this last time it happened, and it’s saved me a lot of otherwise lost time.

If you add a camera to a sequence and key its movement, it’ll have the channels shown before. Clicking on a key will make the playhead jump to that point in the timeline. I do this a lot to make sure I have focal length changes lined up with a change in movement.

What I didn’t know, is that apparently the focal length has its own physical presence within the camera object. So whenever I selected a focal length keyframe so that the time would jump to its location, I was inadvertently selecting the focal length in the 3D viewport. When I thought I was moving and keying the camera, I was moving and keying the focal length, which brought the camera object with it but left its original origin point wherever it was last. You can see below where a second transform channel is created. These two channels cause a discrepancy with the camera’s root position, and causes the rest of the camera’s path to be offset.

From my experience so far, if intentionally done this can actually be beneficial. It’s a quick and easy way to move a camera’s origin point if you actually do want it to rotate around something.

If unintentionally done though, there’s a pretty easy fix. The first step is to delete the transform track. Then simply set any offset location or rotation values to 0, and your camera should be back to where it’s intended to be.

I hope this helps!

Noah Lombard, Brainy Pixel Lead Animator