Camera spring arm And mesh socketing

How do I attach a camera boom/spring arm to a mesh bone socket and not get the camera shaking all about When playing game?

I remember doing it once before but for the life of me I cant remember.

Happy New Year and Thank you!

Does camera lag not work well?

On another note, you could try a proxy system. Make another springarm and “camera” (mesh works fine, turn off visibility) and have the real camera interp to the proxy. Proxy would use camera lag and you can control the blend speed to smooth out jitter.

Oh I may not have explained myself well. I am not blending between cameras. It is just the one camera for the player. When i attach the speing arm to the characters “neck” bone, whenever the mesh plays an animation the camera starts flying all about since its centered to the bone.

however if I DONT socket the spring arm, any time the character does something like crouch, the character is now crouched under the view of the camera.

how do i attach to the mesh and follow the mesh during animations but not lock onto a pivot of a bone?

Maybe this is obvious, but can’t you just child the spring arm to the mesh and mess with socket/target offset?

As for what I’m suggesting, it’s not blending between two cameras, but blending your camera between two points using an interp to smooth out the shakiness. I do this for camera collisions with the environment because the default third person camera is too sudden.

Yes I have tried this, but without an actual anchor point, different animations behave strangely. For example if the player dies, i have a collapse animation, and what happens is a player sees their character drop but then it is off screen til the get up animation fires. so for a moment, the player is seeing a characterless screen. When it is anchored to the bones, the collision triggers and you are at least watching your character on the ground, til he gets up and the camera repositions itself. I tried doing a set view target with 2 cameras, but set view target doesn’t work(unless i haven’t found how) in switching 2 cameras in the same blueprint. I am currently playing with offsetting on events. but it seems counterintuitive to constantly set an offset every possible situation the player can be in. Crouched, crawling, falling, dying etc…

I think I understand the overall system you want, and it sounds like you need to dive into the Camera Manager classes. I know very little about them. But with such a custom need for camera behavior, it would be the cleanest.

Yeah, I don’t think set view works because the spring arm is in charge of the camera.

What if you parent the spring arm to a null object (like a scene component) and then average the location of the null between your ideal points (I’m guessing head/pelvis bones and the capsule collider). Spitballing here, take it or leave it. Custom events does give you control over every scenario in the case it is not formulaic, but yeah, sounds like a pain.

I actually like the null object concept. How would I add the points? would it be a measurement or like adding a component set to hidden in game?

Ill read up on camera manager classes and see what I can learn, Thanks for pointing me in the right directions =)

Good luck with Camera Managers, they are something else.
I found this link very informative and I learned more about cameras in general. But ultimately I went a different route as it was over my head.

A scene component is just a transform, so you can access location (rotation if you please as well) and do stuff with it. I’d think you’d want to use relative locations since it’s all contained in the character bp. Luckily the math is solved for you in this case, just need to call Get Vector Average Array node. I forget what I used it for, but I hope it works out for you.

Yea That stuff is way over my head still as well LOL

What I just implemented as an indefinite “Temporary” fix was to simply do an offset to the camera boom/spring arm for the camera whilst the player is set to crouched and it moves smoothly.

Thanks! At least I got my brain gears working to get to this point with your help!

Hope it works well for all your scenarios (knockdown/ getting up is okay too?)

Glad I could help. Good call to go with a simple idea as you develop; worry about the final feature down the road when the rest of the project comes together.