Character Always Facing Z+

Unity Engine
1

After experimenting with this problem today, I discovered that my character’s camera control script was forcing the parent player object to always face positive Z when starting, which is causing issues with designing levels, and where I am able to place things and after failing to work out the problem the good ol’ fashioned way (changing stuff til’ it works), I thought I should ask here.

I can’t remember where I got this script, it may have been from a YouTube video about a year back about character controllers but I can’t really remember; But that doesn’t change or help the issue.

I believe that somewhere around line 37 the main character’s (variable: character) rotation is being forced into this position because until that point, mouseLook.x has no input, but I cannot be sure.

Please ignore the strange input names, these are being fed through cInput, a third-party input asset.

using UnityEngine;

public class CustomMouseLook : MonoBehaviour {

    public static CustomMouseLook playerCamera;

    Vector2 mouseLook;
    Vector2 smoothV;
    public float sensitivity = 5.0f;
    public float smoothing = 2.0f;

    private float maxSpeed = Mathf.Infinity;
    private float smoothTime = 0.3f;

    private bool isZoomed;

    GameObject character;

    void Start ()
    {
        character = this.transform.parent.gameObject;
    }
  
    void Update ()
    {
        if (!PlayerControl.playerControl.isPaused)
        {
            Vector2 md = new Vector2(cInput.GetAxis("MHorizontal"), cInput.GetAxis("MVertical"));

            md = Vector2.Scale(md, new Vector2(sensitivity * smoothing, sensitivity * smoothing));
            smoothV.x = Mathf.Lerp(smoothV.x, md.x, 1f / smoothing);
            smoothV.y = Mathf.Lerp(smoothV.y, md.y, 1f / smoothing);
            mouseLook += smoothV;
            mouseLook.y = Mathf.Clamp(mouseLook.y, -90f, 90f);

            transform.localRotation = Quaternion.AngleAxis(-mouseLook.y, Vector3.right);
            character.transform.localRotation = Quaternion.AngleAxis(mouseLook.x, character.transform.up);
        }
        if(cInput.GetKeyDown("Zoom"))
        {
            if(!isZoomed)
            {
                GetComponent<Camera>().fieldOfView = 20f;
                isZoomed = true;
            }
            else
            {
                GetComponent<Camera>().fieldOfView = 70f;
                isZoomed = false;
            }
        }
    }
}
2

Yes, line 37 is definitely going to override any rotation you have set to start. You should be able to set a “starting rotation” by assigned a value in degrees to mouseLook.x. If you need to assign this automatically in Start() or whenever, you can use Atan2 to math out its starting angle:

Vector3 charForward = character.transform.forward;
float theta = Mathf.Atan2(charForward.z, charForward.x) * Mathf.Rad2Deg;
mouseLook.x = theta;

(The final angle might be off by 90 degrees or need to be inverse or something. I generally guess-and-check a little when using Atan2.)

3

Not exactly ideal, also not sure where to put this.

I was hoping there was just something I could remove or change to fix this.

4

Not while keeping its ability to turn the character, no.

You can probably put it in Start(). If you’re doing anything fancy with level loading/creation, then you’ll want to do this immediately after loading the level and placing the character (but before the first Update runs).