Using an orbital transposer on fast moving objects

Hey all,

Currently I’m trying to use an orbital transposer to orbit around an object. This works totally fine on stationary targets. However, the behavior breaks down when used on an object in motion. Specifically, the faster the object is moving, the more the behavior breaks down.

Currently, as the camera orbits around, it doesn’t fully “clear” the object, if that makes sense. Essentially the camera isn’t following the object closely enough, so it doesn’t begin drawing the rotation “circle” at the correct point behind the object.

I guess the solution I’m looking for is a way to make the camera stick closer to objects in motion. My current vcam setup for my orbit camera is an orbital transposer body component with standard settings other than no user input allowed. The aim component is a composer with standard settings other than a 0 on the soft zone width and height. I tried messing with the lookahead time on the aim component thinking that might help, but it didn’t seem to fix the issue.

I should note- the camera follow offset is being dynamically calculated off of the model’s dimensions- so this isn’t something that I would like to mess with. As I said, these work perfectly fine for all stationary scenarios, so ideally these values should work with the orbiting behavior as well.

What version of CM are you using?
Can you show the inspector for your vcam?

CM version is 2.7.2. Here’s some screenshots of the vcam inspector.

I should also note that the follow and look at targets are being dynamically assigned during runtime.
7223572--868870--Inspect SS 2.png 7223572--868864--Inspector SS 1.png

Can you make an experiment? Do you have the problem if you turn the orbital transposer’s X/Y/Z damping values down to 0?

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Awesome, that did it! If you don’t mind, could you explain the mechanics of why that fixed the issue? Or direct me to the documentation that might explain it?

Thanks so much!

It’s because of the way the damping is calculated in your version of CM (newer versions have fixed this issue).

The OrbitalTransposer was orbiting a damped target position. If the target is moving fast enough, the transposer would orbit a point farther away from the target than the orbit radius.