Welcome to the GetEditorCamera plugin setup tutorial for Unreal Engine by Scenegraph Studios.

The plugin does not need any instructions apart from placing within the Plugins folder of your project and enabling it.

While developing our product for www.Pitch4D.com Interactive Presentations, we found ourselves dragging actors out from the content folder, and then manually maneuvering them into place, taking a lot of time by swapping between controls of Translate, Rotate, or moving them from the colliding floor upwards.

GetEditorCamera plugin is a Cpp Function Library which exposes the current Editor Camera to blueprints so you can set up a button (created with UE4’s Utility Widget extension plugin), to spawn an actor at the location, or in front of the current editor camera position. Additional files are available for understanding – Cpp Actor, Blueprint Actor, and an editor Utility Widget.

• Spawn actor at the location of the editor camera instead of dragging out from the content library.
• Spawn actor in front of the editor camera by adding an offset (the facing direction of the camera is exposed using some cool math)
• Spawn 3D widgets facing the Camera – making note of this you can create some awesome Presentations to take on Microsoft PowerPoint (We have made this already so check out www.Pitch4D.com if you are interested in 3D presentations for your clients, or to make you look awesome in your pitch’s.

Installation of the plugin through the marketplace should be straight forward, but you will have to enable to the plugin after install.

You may need to restart the editor so your project will see the new plugin.

Reload the project if the above is true. Navigate to Edit->Plugins and enable the GetEditorCamera plugin. This will prompt you to restart your project. Do so.

Now you can search in the EventGraph in the Utility Widget for EditorCamera which will show all the functions/properties you can access.

• Make sure your Unreal Project is closed down.
• Create a Plugins folder in your project Directory
• Copy the GetEditorCamera plugin into the folder.
• Load your project.
• Go to the Edit->Plugins and enable the plugin. This will prompt you to restart your editor

The core class is the Cpp Functions library which contains the functions to be exposed to blueprints.

• GetCameraEditorBPLibrary – Cpp class which exposes the camera editor properties to blueprints.
• MyActor – Cpp clas used for an example to show you how to create your own cpp actors and then spawn them using the Editor Utility Widget.
• ExampleUtilityWidget – Editor Utility Widget UMG class – used as an example to show you how to utilise the Get/Set properties for the editor camera.
  • Allows you to place actors at the location, or infront of the location of the editor camera.
  • Allows you to jump the editor camera to a specific location.
  • Allows you to view the Transform of the Editor Camera.
• BasicActor – A blueprint actor class which is an example being spawned by the ExampleUtilityWidget.

The plugin is very simple to make as you can see from the source files in the project.

1. Create a new Plugin of Blueprint Library
   1. this will give you a function library to build off with some examples.
2. Add the following

Now for the Cpp file, add the following implementation code. Take notice of the include files.

After this, you will need to make sure that your plugin/game has the correct libraries referenced.

In the plugin Build.cs you will need to add the dependency module of UnrealEd to get access to the correct code for getting the camera details.

Thanks to the awesome community of Epic/Unreal, and special thanks to shikosh who found the issue … and fixed it, and even better took the time to leave a comment on the marketplace.

Here is their comment;

Hi, just a heads up – on MyActor.h in Plugins\Marketplace\GetCameraEditor\Source\GetCameraEditor\Public

there’s a compilation error with latest UE4.26.1 – an explicit category is required.

just need to add to the SceneComponent UPROPERTY(…, Category = “Camera”)

so

UPROPERTY(EditAnywhere, BlueprintReadWrite)

turns into

UPROPERTY(EditAnywhere, BlueprintReadWrite, Category = “Camera”)

and it works fine

Come and see our portfolio for other Unreal Engine tutorials

scenegraphstudios.com/reallusion-in-unreal-engine-vr-virtual-reality/