Camera Rotation Limits

[Kurt-Dekker]

If you’re just writing yet another player controller, here’s a great one to study before you do:

A Basic First Person Character Controller for prototyping

[BasicFPCC - A basic first person character controller] Gist Link After some interest in an old post here , I spent the weekend frankensteining snippets of code to make a single script FPCC that could be used like the FPCC from Unity 4~5, including the crouch and run from Aldo, and I also added farcry sliding. There is a Menu Item function to easily create and configure a new FPCC object. Otherwise very easy to set up, it only requires a layer to exclude itself from sphere/raycasts…

That one has run, walk, jump, slide, crouch… it’s crazy-nutty!!

You might even want to start from it.

Otherwise, here’s rotation nitty-gritty:

Your best bet is to have local-only float variables to represent traverse and elevation, then change and clamp those floats, and finally drive .localRotation of the parts on their correct Transform axis.

Notes on clamping rotations and NOT using .eulerAngles because of gimbal lock:

Implement a limit in Camera Movement

Generally never read / write to / from eulerAngles. The reason is gimbal lock. Instead track your own float variable that is the heading, adjust and clamp that variable, then “drive” the camera’s rotation each frame.

Implement a limit in Camera Movement

declare a variable float heading; adjust it when conditions warrant: if (conditionToTurn) { heading += AdjustmentWhateverYouWant; } clamp it heading = Mathf.Clamp( heading, minimum, maximum); drive the rotation to the camera transform: cameraTransform.localRotation = Quaterion.Euler( 0, heading, 0);

How to instantly see gimbal lock for yourself:

Confusing bug

Pretty sure this is gimbal lock. To see what I mean: put a cube in a blank scene using the inspector, independently rotate it a little bit around x, y, z - works as expected now set x rotation to 90 try rotate around y and z - note that z works identically to y rotation! You can no longer rotate z! In the context of your game, I’m not sure what the best solution would be, but there’s a few possibilities. Check out some youtube tutorials on changing gravity controllers…

All about Euler angles and rotations, by StarManta:

https://starmanta.gitbooks.io/unitytipsredux/content/second-question.html

ALSO…

Camera stuff is pretty tricky… I hear all the Kool Kids are using Cinemachine from the Unity Package Manager.

There’s even a dedicated Camera / Cinemachine area: see left panel.

If you insist on making your own camera controller, do not fiddle with camera rotation.

The simplest way to do it is to think in terms of two Vector3 points in space:

1. where the camera is LOCATED
2. what the camera is LOOKING at

private Vector3 WhereMyCameraIsLocated;
private Vector3 WhatMyCameraIsLookingAt;

void LateUpdate()
{
  cam.transform.position = WhereMyCameraIsLocated;
  cam.transform.LookAt( WhatMyCameraIsLookingAt);
}

Then you just need to update the above two points based on your GameObjects, no need to fiddle with rotations. As long as you move those positions smoothly, the camera will be nice and smooth as well, both positionally and rotationally.