Camera moving independently of parent??

Unity Engine
1

I have a strange scenario that I did not expect to happen, and don’t understand WHY it’s happening:

I created an empty “Player” GameObject, which I assigned a CharacterController to. This is for a first-person VR game, and the reason I did it this way is because it is VR… I can’t use standard FPS player for a few reasons:

  1. I don’t want the camera view to be forced to rotate when the character (charactercontroller) does. That would be very jarring and nauseating.
  2. I need to be able to show the character’s body (it’s very odd to be in a 3D world and look down and see no body)

So, what I do to solve these issues are to create a Player Object (which has the character controller), and under that place a 3D character prefab (with animations, etc.) under a Player, but I eliminate the head mesh and replace it with a camera where the head would be. This is the first-person main camera.

This works fine, except I am running into a strange problem: when the Player object moves around, the Camera doesn’t seem to maintain a static position within it! Suddenly, the camera will shift over slightly and instead of being on the neck, it is now on the right shoulder. Or it will lag behind, and the character’s body will actually end up IN FRONT OF the camera.

Any thoughts on how this could possibly be happening?

2

It actually looks like it’s not the camera that’s moving… it’s the underlying mesh/animation that keeps shifting position slightly… wonder why? It is still a child of the GameObject that has the charactercontroller causing it to move…

And the animations are in-place/static (there is no positional movement within the animations themselves…)

3

Figured it out… (I think); animations were apparently moving because of when the transitions would occur, and because they weren’t baked to retain axis position. I could only fix it by baking to xz, and y, and rotation…