Pawn Class 3D Character

Unreal Engine 5, C++

A custom character controller built from scratch on top of Unreal's bare Pawn class instead of the built-in Character class — assembling the collision, mesh, and camera components by hand and routing input through the newer Enhanced Input System.

What was built

• Component setup from scratch — a capsule collision component as the root, with a skeletal mesh, spring arm, and camera attached on top. DefaultPawnClass on the GameMode points at it, and physics simulation is turned off on both the capsule and mesh so movement is entirely code-driven rather than physics-driven.
• Enhanced Input, done manually — IA_Move and IA_Look input actions handle WASD and mouse input, but instead of leaning on the engine's AddControllerYawInput() / AddControllerPitchInput() helpers, yaw and pitch get computed directly from the raw mouse input and applied with AddActorLocalRotation().
• Frame-independent movement — movement and rotation both run through DeltaTime, with move direction derived from the Pawn's own forward/right vectors rather than world axes.

Going past the base requirement

The base assignment only asked for flat-plane movement and rotation, no gravity. It ended up going further in both directions:

• Full 6-degree-of-freedom flight — move and rotate on all six axes (forward/back, strafe, up/down, yaw, pitch, roll), all in the Pawn's local space rather than world space, so the direction of travel always matches the way it's currently facing.
• A manual gravity and landing system on top of that — a constant downward acceleration applied every tick (rather than using Unreal's built-in physics gravity), a line/sweep trace to detect when it's actually touching ground, and the vertical velocity getting zeroed out the instant it lands.
• Air control — movement speed drops to 30–50% of the grounded speed while airborne, with the grounded and airborne states handled as separate branches of logic rather than one blended formula.

Links

GitHub · YouTube