Unreal Engine Tips: Create a Screen Fade Effect in blueprints using the Camera Component

Screen fade effects can provide visual feedback for gameplay states like low health or being downed. Games like Borderlands 2 use this during the Fight For Your Life mechanic, where the screen darkens as time runs out. A simple approach to implement this using blueprints in Unreal Engine is to use screen desaturation and vignette intensity directly on the camera component.

To implement this, we first set up a timer to track the time remaining in the downed state. On each timer execution, we can then remap the remaining time into a normalized range that feeds into the camera's post process settings, as shown in the screenshot below.

The normalized value adjusts both saturation and vignette intensity. As the remaining time decreases, saturation drops to drain color from the screen while vignette intensity increases to darken the edges. Since both are applied on the camera component, the effect stays tied to the player's view.

With this setup, the fade intensity scales naturally as the remaining time decreases, making the visual feedback respond directly to how close the player is to bleeding out.