Third Person Flying Camera

Question

I am having issues creating a third-person camera for my Rogue Squadron (N64) like game. First I have posted my issue on the official Unity Answers site here. So far my ship is behaving as I want and the camera follows position correctly (XYZ), however, it doesn't rotate how I would like. My first attempt was to set the rotation of the camera to the rotation of the ship and realized that is not what I am looking for either. I have found some information on rotating around a (pivot) point but I am having trouble understanding them. For example, I have found this and this but Im not sure how they work. The end result would be something like the camera found here. Thank you for any help, I would greatly appreciate a description of what you are doing/how it works. Lastly this is done in C# in Unity. I can provide my code if needed.

Answer 1

Hello and welcome to the community!

Solution 1 - manually setting rotation and position

You almost got it, you just need to do camera offset a bit different. Transform has handy-dandy properties, called .foward, .right, which are normalized vectors for the direction the Transform is looking at.

Now imagine your player ir facing north (transform.forward is (x=0, y=0, z=1)). To move camera 5 units behind, you would do cameraPosition = playerPosition + playerTransform.forward * -5f. The multiplication would result in (x=0, y=0, z=-5) and camera would be placed 5 units behind. Easy, right?

Now what if you want to place 5 units behids plus two units to the left? You add those Vectors together, which results in cameraPosition = playerPosition + ((playerTransform.forward * -5f) + (playerTransform.right * -4f)). Now your camera is placed 5 units behind and 4 unit left of the player.

To place the camera 2 units above the player, you would just use transform.up property and the whole routine is the same.

After setting the offset, use camera.rotation = player.rotation to rotate camera to right angle.

Here's a quick snippet for camera, that follows set object:

public class TransformFollower : MonoBehaviour
{
    public Vector3 offset;
    public Transform target;

    private void Update()
    {
        transform.position = target.position +
            (target.right * offset.x) +
            (target.up * offset.y) +
            (target.forward * offset.z);

        transform.rotation = target.rotation;
    }
}

Solution 2 - let Unity hierarchy do it for you

If you're never going to Destroy player character object, you could make the camera as a child of the Player object. Then setting offset in the inspector. All rotation and following would be done automatically by the Unity engine, as the Camera would be anchored to the Player.