How to make your old CameraAnims work in Unreal Engine 5.1 and up
Or why it can be dangerous to skip engine versions when upgrading your project.
Nick Pfisterer •
A while back, I upgraded an Unreal Engine 4.x project straight to Unreal Engine 5.1, and all was well. Or so it seemed.
I changed something in my player character blueprint, clicked Compile, and got a surprising error. This was a first-person game, and my headbob camera animations broke. It turns out I was using the old Matinee-based CameraAnim class for my jump and land headbobs, which were deprecated in 5.0 and completely removed in 5.1.
I totally missed this during the conversion process. I really didn’t want to recreate the animations from scratch, either. As luck would have it, I still had a copy of the project set to use 5.0.
To fix this problem, I opened the project in 5.0, found each CameraAnim in the content browser, and did a right-click > Convert to Sequence for each one.
Now I had Camera Animation Sequence assets that were compatible with 5.1. They had the exact same animation data as their CameraAnim predecessors. I made sure they looked good, then upgraded the project to 5.1.
But wait, there’s more! If you’re calling these in your player blueprint like I was, you will need to update your blueprint graph as well. Before, I was calling the Play Camera Anim function on the Player Camera Manager, which is gone in 5.1. Now, you need to get the Gameplay Cameras Subsystem and call Play Camera Animation, then select the Camera Animation Sequence you want to play.
Now you should be back in business. It was a small thing for me since I only had a few camera animations, but if you have a lot, it sure would be a pain to recreate them all from scratch.
I hope you found this article before you deleted the old version of your project!