Camera is not good enough

Reported by: Eldar Bertsel

October 27, 2023

THE PROBLEM

This week I had work on fixing the camera because the FOV was too low,  the player couldn't look up and overall it just felt bad. First issue that I ran into is adjusting the rigs of the cinemachine free look camera. Apparently you can only set the rigs height and radius but you can't set how the camera will move from one rig to another. I wanted it to look like a sphere but Instead was getting something like a triangle with made of curved lines. There is a spline curvature slider(controls how taut is the line that connects the rig's orbits) that you can drag but it doesn't really produce the result I wanted with the height I wanted. Another issue I had was camera lock on having a weird camera angle while looking at boss enemies up-close. If the player would lock on the boss and get close to him, the camera will move down below the player and below the ground making it look like the player and everyone else is floating because the camera clip through the ground. 

THE SOLUTION

The solution for the camera looking bad was fixed just by adjusting everything I could in the cinemachine free look camera component. It looks like the camera angles in games are completely unique and the only way to make them look good and perform good is to just play with numbers. The solution for the camera lock on clipping and looking from bottom up at the bosses up close was a little tougher to solve but was relatively the same. I had to play with numbers, but I also had to learn how to use dead zones because that is what actually prevents the camera from having weird angles. For the clipping I used a built in cinemachine collider. Also, I am using one lock on camera for both, regular enemies and bosses. I thought that I would have to use 2 different cameras since the point that the camera is looking at while being locked on is located in different places for regular enemies and bosses, but I managed to use only 1 camera for both of them. I like a lot how the camera is working right now. I think it looks as close as dark souls 3 camera does.