How do I keep the camera behind the player?

Question

I am developing a Third Person Shooter.

Until now, I had parented the camera to player. It would therefore automatically stay behind the player.

Because this would not work well with Root Motion, I need to use a different approach:

In my script, I need to make it so that the camera follows the player.

How could I make it so that the camera stays behind the player at always the same position (and with the same rotation)?

This is my current code, but it doesn't work:

    _camera.transform.rotation = Quaternion.Euler(0, this.transform.rotation.eulerAngles.y, 0);
    _camera.transform.position = _InitialCamPos + this.transform.position;

Can anybody help?

Thank you!

Answer 1

It looks like you want something like this:

// Get a "yaw-only" rotation without relying on Euler angles.
var forward = transform.forward;
forward.y = 0;    
_camera.transform.rotation = Quaternion.LookRotation(forward);

// Map the camera position from the player's local space to world space.
_camera.transform.position = transform.TransformPoint(_InitialCamPos);

Here _InitialCamPos is measured in the local coordinate system of this object. So for instance if the character's origin is at its feet, and you want the camera to be 1 m above that and nudged 0.1 m forward, that's (0, 1, 0.1). The TransformPoint method will automatically handle adjusting this based on the character's rotation and translation.

If you need to determine _InitialCamPos dynamically based on where the camera was at scene load time, you can use something like this:

void Awake() {
     _InitialCamPos = transform.InverseTransformPoint(_camera.transform.position);
}

This maps a world space point into the object's local coordinate system.

Answer 2

Create an empty gameobject as a child of your player then attach the camera to the empty gameobject and reposition camera as per your need. Hierarchy would look something like:

 Player
    |- EmptyGO
          |- Camera

Answer 3

Why don't you use unity cinemachine it has a lot of different camera options and you can do most of the thing without coding and it is really flexible. Here are the docs: https://docs.unity3d.com/Packages/[email protected]/manual/index.html