Unreal Engine ships with a ready-made Third Person template. It works, and that is exactly its problem: you use it without knowing what is inside, and the first setting that misbehaves leaves you with nowhere to look. So we rebuild it. Not to do better — to understand.
The starting project, with the character and its animations (idle, walk, jog, jump), can be downloaded under the video. You go straight to the Blueprint, without wasting time gathering assets.
The character Blueprint
At the root of the project, a Blueprint folder will hold the two classes we are about to create. Right-click, Blueprint Class, and start from the Character class — the one that already brings everything a playable character needs.
It arrives with three components worth naming properly, because we will come back to them constantly: the capsule, which is the collision volume; the arrow, which points forward; and the Character Movement, which holds walk speed, jump height and the rest.
- 1Select the Mesh component and assign it a Skeletal Mesh — a 3D asset that has bones, and can therefore be animated.
- 2Move it down with the position gizmo so it fits inside its capsule.
- 3Turn it with the rotation gizmo so it faces the same direction as the arrow.
A mesh sticking out of the capsule, or facing sideways, is the classic beginner mistake: the character will clip through walls at an angle and play its animations against its own walking direction.
Spring Arm and camera
The camera is part of the character: it follows him everywhere. Yet you never attach it directly — you go through a Spring Arm, a selfie stick that comes with one precious feature: if a wall slips between the camera and the character, it pulls in on its own to keep the view clear.
The Spring Arm goes on the capsule, the camera goes on the Spring Arm. A length of 500 gives a comfortable distance, and raising the arm slightly puts the camera at shoulder height.
The Game Mode
The level does not yet know which character to spawn. That is the Game Mode’s job. Create a second Blueprint class, this time from Game Mode Base, and point its Default Pawn Class field at your character.
All that remains is to link the level to that Game Mode: World Settings window, GameMode Override line. Hit play — the character appears, camera in the right place.
Enhanced Input: context and actions
Unreal Engine 5 handles controls through the Enhanced Input System. Two things to keep apart: the Mapping Context says which keys are active, the Input Action says what each key does.
In the character’s Event Graph, on Event BeginPlay, get the Enhanced Input Local Player Subsystem and hand it your Mapping Context through Add Mapping Context. Without that call, no key will respond — it is the single most common oversight.
An Input Action has a value type. Movement takes two at once, left/right and forward/back: that is an Axis2D. So does the camera. Jump only needs a pressed or released state: a boolean is enough.
Movement
The stick returns two axes. You feed them into Add Movement Input, but not in world space: in camera space. Otherwise the character heads north whenever you push forward, whatever the view is doing.
- 1Get the controller rotation and keep only the yaw: without that, looking at the ground would send the character diving into it.
- 2Derive the forward and right vectors from it with Get Forward Vector and Get Right Vector.
- 3Feed the Y axis into the forward vector and the X axis into the right vector, each through its own Add Movement Input.
On a keyboard, the keys have to be described in the Mapping Context: W and S on the Y axis, A and D on the X axis, with a Negate modifier on the two keys that go backward and left. On a gamepad a single binding is enough: the stick already returns both axes.
Turning the character towards its direction
At this point the character moves but keeps staring straight ahead. Three checkboxes change everything, in the Blueprint details and in Character Movement:
| Setting | What to do with it |
|---|---|
| Use Controller Rotation Yaw | Uncheck it. Checked, the character pivots with the camera even while standing still. |
| Orient Rotation to Movement | Check it, in Character Movement. The character turns towards the direction he is moving in. |
| Rotation Rate | How fast that turn happens. Too high and he spins like a weathervane; too low and he skids through the turn. |
Camera and jump
The camera follows the same principle as movement: two axes, this time wired into Add Controller Yaw Input and Add Controller Pitch Input. On a mouse, the vertical axis usually needs a Negate so the motion is not inverted.
The jump is simpler: the Character class already provides the Jump and Stop Jumping functions. The action calls Jump when it starts and Stop Jumping when it completes. That release is what makes short hops possible.
The Animation Blueprint and its State Machine
The character moves, but slides along the floor with no animation. Create a second class, an Animation Blueprint, pointing it at the character’s skeleton — then assign it to the Mesh component in the Anim Class field.
In the AnimGraph, add a State Machine. It holds two states: grounded and airborne. Moving between them rests on a single condition, the Is Falling value from Character Movement, read in the Animation Blueprint’s Event Graph.
The variables the animation needs — speed and airborne state — are updated in the Blueprint Update Animation event, by getting the pawn and then its Character Movement. That is the contact point between game logic and animation.
The 1D Blend Space
The grounded state does not play one animation but a blend. A 1D Blend Space takes one axis — here, speed — and moves from one animation to the next as it climbs: idle at 0, walk around 150, run at 500.
Speed comes from the character’s Velocity and its length (Vector Length). That value is what you feed into the Blend Space input. Transitions become gradual, without a single extra node.
If the feet skate, the Blend Space is not at fault: the character’s real speed and the speed baked into the animation disagree. Set Max Walk Speed in Character Movement to match the run animation.
Jump and landing
The airborne state splits in turn: take-off, looping fall, and landing. Take-off flows into the fall automatically, at the end of the animation. The fall loops as long as Is Falling stays true. Touching down triggers the landing, which hands back to the grounded state once it finishes.
On every transition, the blend duration matters as much as the animation itself: too long and the character floats; too short and the switch snaps.
What you have now
A character who walks, runs, turns towards his direction, jumps and lands — with a camera that follows him. In other words the Third Person template, except you know every piece of it: the Game Mode that spawns him, the actions that drive him, the State Machine that picks his animations and the Blend Space that mixes them.
This is the base everything else grafts onto: directional starts, quick turns, foot placement, airborne animations. Each one gets its own video.