Free Look camera and mouse responsiveness

Hi,

I am using Cinemachine Free Look rig to control an over-the-shoulder third person character. I love Cinemachine's features but I found the responsiveness to mouse input to be very bad.

Default settings of the X and Y axis controls simply limit the maximum camera movement to something very low - basically if you move the mouse really fast, the camera moved a disproportionally small amount. It's a simulated "negative acceleration" akin to bad PC ports where mouse is basically an emulated analogue stick.

Raising the "Max Speed" of the axis controls also raises the "sensitivity" of the camera for some reason, so the value multipliers in the Input Manager need to be lowered drastically. This doesn't really fix the problem, and also introduces incredible camera jerkiness when Editor drops frames and delta time spikes up (very frequent with complex inspectors or custom editor windows present).

In short, how can I use the features of the Freelook camera rig (I love the top-mid-bottom rig and obstacle avoidance), but preserving the 1:1 native mouse input as we've all come to expect from PC games?

EDIT:
Side note - Camera Collider doesn't work well with Camera Offset - it appears collider is always applied first regardless of script order, resulting in camera clipping through walls anyway.

 

Bump. Nobody else has mouse responsiveness problems when using Cinemachine Free Look?

I can produce examples/videos to demonstrate the problem if needed.

 

These are my values:


The axis value multiplier in Input Manager is 0.01 to achieve normal responsiveness, but I'm still not happy with this. I would like the "maximum" speed to be effectively unlimited, and not affect the sensitivity (Warframe has exceptional mouse responsiveness in a third person camera, for example).

I would very much like to manually drive the axis values - how do I do this? I couldn't find anything in the documentation.

 

I'll give it a go later today. Thank you very much for your time and help!

 

I did it. Recalculating the mouse input values into axis values was a lot easier than I thought.

For any future Google travellers looking to get 1:1 mouse responsiveness out of your Cinemachine Free Look, first of all hi! I hope Anthem is better now! Second, here, slap this into the virtual camera with Free Look script on it:

Code (CSharp):

1.  
2. using Cinemachine;
3. using UnityEngine;
4.  
5. public class CinemachineManualFreeLook : MonoBehaviour
6. {
7.     private CinemachineFreeLook freeLook;
8.  
9.     public float horizontalAimingSpeed = 20f;
10.     public float verticalAimingSpeed = 20f;
11.  
12.     [Tooltip("This depends on your Free Look rigs setup, use to correct Y sensitivity,"
13.         + " about 1.5 - 2 results in good Y-X square responsiveness")]
14.     public float yCorrection = 2f;
15.  
16.     private float xAxisValue;
17.     private float yAxisValue;
18.  
19.     private void Awake()
20.     {
21.         freeLook = GetComponent<CinemachineFreeLook>();
22.     }
23.  
24.     private void Update()
25.     {
26.         float mouseX = Input.GetAxis("Mouse X") * horizontalAimingSpeed * Time.deltaTime;
27.         float mouseY = Input.GetAxis("Mouse Y") * verticalAimingSpeed * Time.deltaTime;
28.  
29.         // Correction for Y
30.         mouseY /= 360f;
31.         mouseY *= yCorrection;
32.  
33.         xAxisValue += mouseX;
34.         yAxisValue = Mathf.Clamp01(yAxisValue - mouseY);
35.  
36.         freeLook.m_XAxis.Value = xAxisValue;
37.         freeLook.m_YAxis.Value = yAxisValue;
38.     }
39. }
40.  

Pastebin link for convenience:
https://pastebin.com/ryGiyMhb

 

Resurrecting the thread in favor of opening a new one;

How do I go about that?

I made a copy of the Offset script, it's recognized nicely. Changing the Stage bit to Body obviously messes up the math.
This doesn't appear to work correctly:

Code (CSharp):

1. protected override void PostPipelineStageCallback(
2.         CinemachineVirtualCameraBase vcam,
3.         CinemachineCore.Stage stage, ref CameraState state, float deltaTime)
4.     {
5.         if (stage == CinemachineCore.Stage.Body)
6.         {
7.             Vector3 offset = transform.localToWorldMatrix * m_Offset;
8.             state.ReferenceLookAt += offset;
9.             state.PositionCorrection += offset;
10.         }
11.     }

How do I correctly offset the camera during Body stage?

 

What is the camera target within this scope? vcam.Follow and vcam.LookAt give me the same result.

 

When using Eudaimonium's 1:1 free look script you have to set max speed, accell and decell of both y and x axis to 0.
Also attach the script to the top of the virtual camera, above the "Cinemachine Free Look (Script)", to get smooth movement

edit:it still doesnt work, move speed is limited when moving the mouse very fast. And sometimes its jittery when starting the game.I will have to try some other solution

 

Incorrect, I use it exclusively for mouse input, I can feel no artificial damping or upper speed limiting in my controls. it just "feels" right. The whole "offset over the shoulder" thing is another can of worms, though, but as for the responsiveness itself, it's what I set out to do.

Parappa2, are you sure you removed the strings from the "Input Axis Name" fields in the Free Look script? My script assumes those are blank, so the axis values are driven externally. Gregoryl's script explicitly clears those fields on Awake, though. I should've probably done that.

 

no i didnt do that

 

Yeah I definitely should've mentioned that

Give it a shot, see if it works then.

 

@Eudaimonium using your script finally cinemachine feels responsive.
I don't get it why cinemachine doesn't have this kind of input mode built in :/
Thanks a lot man.

 

Big +1 from me, I feel like the default input/control on Cinemachine's virtual cameras is fine for something like a controller, but feels laggy and insensitive with the mouse. Surprised there aren't more people making FPS saying the same thing.

Have noticed this as well. Seems like 0.1 is almost the only value to use here. Smaller gets jerkier, over 0.1 gets laggier.

 

Finally!!! Thank you for adding this to CM

 

I guess better late than never, but here's my custom camera collider which works with the whole "over the shoulder but slightly offset to the side third person camera" thing. I've basically gutted the built-in collider and made it use one sphere cast instead of many MANY raycasts it normally uses.

 

Hey Gregoryl,
How does one dynamically switch between Input Value Gain mode and Max Speed mode if they want to have both controller or mouse input options in the final product? Due to the time-dependent nature of Max Speed mode and time-independence of Input Value Gain, I am experiencing framerate dependence with controller input.

 

@Gregoryl This code is great Thanks. And if you have any good code or setup for Offset X Top-Mid-Bottom Rig that makes character is little bit offseted to the left can you share please ? I did some setup by myself but i did not get a great result. And one more thing how can i make zoom out and zoom in(without FOV).
Thanks .

 

@Gregoryl Hi, I already watched that video.But this camera doesn't have x y rotation with mouse. It always rotates with player. So i created a new gameobject and set position to my character position on update .I made the 3rdPerson camera follow that gameobject and now it doesn't rotates with my player, and then i merged your code("FreeLookAxisDriver) with the camera. As a result i got exactly what I wanted perfectly. Now i can aim(zoom) perfectly with saving aim position (which i cant do this with freeLookCamera ), rotate around player with mouse(X,Y) and follow the player.

Thank you very much again. Your code helped me so much.

 

Hi there. Do you have a version of this script that works with Unity's new Input system? I tried myself, but there's too much going on in that script for somebody like myself to alter.

Also, changing "Max Speed" to "Input Value Gain" does not give the desired results. I still don't understand why Cinemachine doesn't handle like a normal gaming camera out-of-box.

 

I was having some jerky movement from mouse with the CM_Freelook cam and the new input system. I was able to resolve it by adding the "Cinemachine Input Provider" with the appropriate MouseLook Action in the XY Axis field, Setting the CM_Freelook Axis controls: both to Input Value Gain and a much lower speed settings. In my Input Action: MouseLook(Vector2 Passthrough) with 2 bindings: Right Stick [Gamepad] and Mouse(Delta) with a normalize Vector2 Processor. Both the gamepad and mouse are working pretty well. Hope this helps someone.

 

I have the problem that Input Value Gain seems to be framerate dependent. Setting the speed at 60fps and then changing the fps to 30 will result in way faster input speed. Also at very high framerates the camera gets very slow and also seems to stutter (doesn't recognize movement).