Jittering camera follow with Vector3.Lerp in LateUpdate

I'm having a weird thing going on with camera follow. I've got all of my player movement in

FixedUpdate

, and then my camera follow script running in

LateUpdate

to prevent stutter. Now, here is the weird thing. If I do a simple follow by setting the camera position to the target position:

Code (CSharp):

1. transform.position = targets[0].transform.position + positionOffset;

I have no problem whatsoever. However, if I instead do a linearly interpolated follow using

Vector3.Lerp

:

Code (CSharp):

1. transform.position = Vector3.Lerp(transform.position, targets[0].transform.position + positionOffset, Time.deltaTime * positionSmoothSpeed);

The target starts to jitter uncontrollably. Any thoughts? I've tried a bunch of things and nothing fixes it. Thanks in advance!

 

If you are following a physics object, you want to have your camera in FixedUpdate() as well. The source of the jitter is that there are a different number of calls made to FixedUpdate() vs Update and LateUpdate(). For the latter two, they are called an identical number of times each frame, whereas FixedUpdate() is different.

If you're not following a physics object, just use Update() for both, or perhaps LateUpdate() for the camera.

It's possible there is something else going on with the lerp, as I don't know how your positionOffset and/or positionSmoothSpeed values were defined. Just know the third argument to lerp is always clamped from 0.0f to 1.0f.

 

Ok! I'm following a physics object, so I'll switch to using

FixedUpdate

and

Time.fixedDeltaTime

. Thanks for the help!

 

You're welcome! This can also help you visualize the "why" of what I mentioned above:

https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/ExecutionOrder.html

It has a great graphic flowchart.