Cinemachine Collider Third Person FreeLook with Jitter

Hello,

I try to use the Cinemachine Collider with my FreeLook camera, but I still did not get good results.
If the camera collides with a wall and I move the mouse in order to rotate on the rig, the collision will be avoid rather smoothly. But things get tricky when my player is encycled with constantly moving enemies, then the camera repositions all the time, it's like warping to new position around the player, which is totally annoying with the fighting system. I tried all avoidance strategies with different parameters, but still no luck. So is there a way I can have no camera clipping but still smooth camera transitions? And there is totally enough free room around the player and the enemy mob, I have a rather big open arena, with no ceiling and other obstacles.

 

Actually, I want the camera to collide against my enemies, so I select the "Enemy" layer for the parameter "Collide against". The problem is just the avoidance is not smooth and smoothing values seems to really have no huge impact. Even the different strategies seems to be bugged, for example if I choose "Preserve camera height" then the camera sometimes choose a lower spot inside my player character.

The multiple camera setup does not really help me since I have a Free Look camera with three rigs, so the player has to be in control everytime. I would rather have one camera that avoide walls and enemies more smoothly. Is there any example of such a setup?

 

I'm not really sure about your first solution. When I set the max distance for the collider to a higher value, then the radius of the bottom rig will be ignored despite when there is no collision. I would rather expect that it only goes to the higher avoidance distance if there is some occlusion. So there is no befenit if the camera ignore the lower bottom rig radius if there is no collision. I don't understand the design implementation here.

For me, the camera goes all the time to the max distance, even if there is no occlusion.
For example, if I set the avoidance max distance to 10, then the camera will always have a distance of 10 to the player, whether if there is a collision or not, ignoring also the freelook camera's rig heights and radius. Very odd.

Also, I do not understand the shot evaluation value. It seems to have no impact on the collider behaviour. Are there other settings that influencing the collider script in a bad way?

I like to have the following behaviour: The player can use the freelook camera at every time but if there is some occlusion, the camera will smoothly find a point where no occlusion is.
So if the player is very dense encycled by enemies all around, the camera should rather pick a location far more away to the player and the enmies. So the camera should not find a spot between the player and the enemies (since there is mostly no space) but rather go behind the cycle of the player and enemies. Also, the new obstacle free spot should not switch fast every frame, there should be some time out, so it will not constantly warp to location due to enemies moving, blocking the view in one frame, not blocking the view in the next frame.

 

Actually, it is really simply to observe.
Have a FreeLook camera and a Collider script.
Then set the avoidance max distance to any higher then the highest radius of all three FreeLook rigs radius.
Click play and observe the camera will always stay at the avoidance max distance whether there is an occlusion or not, destroying the FreeLook camera rig settings.

I just tested it with an empty scene, a capsule primitive as the lookat target and adding a freelook camera from the Cinemachine context menu.

So I do not get what the use case of this parameter is, when you have a FreeLook camera.
It is just a global distance to lookat target parameter, overriding the freelook camera's rig radius, put into the collider script (where it should not be). Therefore, the tooltip for this is misleading.

Nevertheless, is there any example or tested use case by Unity, showing Cinemachine is capable of smooth occlusion avoidance with third person freelook on a map with many moving objects?
GTA V, RDR2, etc. like...?

 

I checked the preview packages and the collider component is actually working more smoothly, and I'm wondering why it is not working like this with the freelook camera in the current package (2.5.0). Did you fixed a bug with the collider script or introduced other improvements? So the solution is to switch to the approach with the framing transposer and POV instead of a FreeLook?

 

Just a feedback of disapprovement for this choice, the built in collider is very limited in respect to the Extension...

 

In particular I miss the different strategies to solve the collision

 

I still don't agree, you suggested in multiple places to switch from FreeLook to 3rdPerson Follow, which I would love to do because we need to offset the player from camera center without causing secondary problems, but:
1. one has to integrate his own camera control code (I'm trying to integrate two AxisState to handle input).
2. the collision is limited to PullCameraForward, which is bad for our game.
So I think I'm wasting time trying to integrate the 3rd person follow.

Regarding the performance cost consideration, in my opinion that's an evaluation game-makers should make, not tool-makers.