Getting the Widget Component to Always Face the Camera in UE5
When creating an actor that has a widget component attache it be helpful to sometimes have that widget always face the player's camera
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Game Engine
Unreal Engine 5.5.0
IDE
Rider 2024.3
Project Name
MyProject
Getting a widget component to face the camera can be achieved simply by using the AlignMeshToTheCamera
material node.
The default material for a widget component is Widget3DPassThrough_Masked_OneSided
which is an instance of Widget3DPassThrough
. So I copied over Widget3DPassThrough
to content folder so I can edit it without consequence. The file path for the material is /Engine/EngineMaterials/Widget3DPassThrough.Widget3DPassThrough
.
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I copied the material over to /Game/Materials/Widgets
and renamed it to M_Widget3DPassThrough_Align
. Open up the material to edit it. Add the AlighMeshToTheCamera
node to the material and attach the World Position Offset
pin to the material's World Position Offset
value pin.
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To be consistent I created a material instance from M_Widget3DPassThrough_Align
and called it M_Widget3DPassThrough_Align_Masked_OneSided
and updated it match the engine version.
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Create a new Blueprint and add a widget component to the actor. For testing I added a skeletal mesh a put a health bar component above the actor. In the widget component update the material to our newly created M_Widget3DPassThrough_Align_Masked_OneSided
and then very importantly we must also change the widget's rotation to be absolute.
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Below is the final result.
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This example can be seen in the project's gym using the BP_MyStructPlayer Blueprint.
I hope this helps.
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Harrison McGuire
akhilthambi
Thank you for the simple and useful tip