Why is my camera spring arm jittering when I enable Camera Lag?

Hi

I’ve made a flying spaceship blueprint and attached a spring arm component with a camera as a child of the spring arm for a third person view.

This all works lovely apart from I notice that when I select ‘enable camera lag’ on the spring, when the ship is moving and the spring is at it’s max length the camera jitters alot. I’m guessing there’s a fight between max length of the spring and the spring trying to recoil back to it’s initial length.

I’m using physics to move the spaceship rather than using a translate if that makes any difference.

This is easily reproducible without having to make a flying spaceship:

  1. create a new project using the vehicle template

  2. go into the ‘Sedan’ blueprint and enable ‘camera lag’ on the spring arm component.

  3. accelerate the car to full speed

  4. observe jittery annoying camera.

So question is has anyone else encountered this and got a solution or is it best to just script my own camera?

I am having this same, not sure what the problem is. I know if you do it this way Peter L Newton Tutorial the jitter is gone. I wonder if has to do with event tick?

sorry for the late response Unrealguy I’m on holiday so not been on here for a few days.

I’ve noticed it’s not very good for flying objects where you have full 360 rotation either. Just try pitching up/down and the camera doesn’t follow it very well (not sure if its the old gimbal lock problem because it doesn’t use Quarternions). To be honest I’ve made my own camera instead and just gave up using the spring arm.

Yeah Peter Newton has some good tutorials by the look of it, not bothered going through them yet but I did subscribe to his You Tube channel a while back.

I’d be interested to know what type of view and game you are using to get the problem?

Hi savagebeasty,
Here’s is the link to game I’m working on with flying object. It’s more of a side scroller.

YoutubeLink

Sorry I don’t have an answer for you yet, but I am having this as well, doing a car racing game, the faster the car goes the worse the problem gets… the jittering is really frustrating! I also want to be able to use a full 360 camera, and have it “snap” back to being behind the car after a short delay when there is no input from the user.

Because of the jittering and custom functionality I want, I’m trying to work out a way of adding the camera lag without turning it on in the details panel, instead creating a custom solution in blueprint. It is still a WIP but I will make sure to let you know when I get it functioning, but it is a lot of trial and error and the moment… :slight_smile:

BTW unrealguy: I like the look of your game so far! Looks really cool

I’ve been doing some more testing and I thought it was a performance. It doesn’t seem to be since I stripped everything but the default static mesh out of the level and set the game to the lowest settings. I tested the movement and I get random jittering or lag spikes every so often. I’m wondering if it has something to do with the acceleration or max speed working together causing problems. I will keep you posted too. I’m subscribed to this thread.

And thanks for the compliment :slight_smile:

Sorry the internet is down in this 3rd world country I’m currently in so can’t watch the video unless I want to use data roaming :slight_smile:

Will give it a watch later in the week when I’m back.

Here’s a question for you both though. How are you moving your player object? I’m using pure physics so I’m using ‘set physics angular velocity’ for rotation and ‘add impulse’ / ‘set physics linear velocity’ for the forward thrust.

Just wondering if it’s to do with physics as that uses a fixed frame rate whereas the camera movement would be running off the tick frame rate. I think…that’s how Unity worked anyway so I’m assuming UE4 does as well. I did try reducing the substep timing but it didn’t make any difference.

Hi savagebeasty,

I wasn’t able to reproduce your in house. Could you post your dxdiag? Here is a link on how to find that info if you need it.

Hi savagebeastly,

We are marking this post as Resolved for tracking purposes. When you get back and have time to continue researching this, please feel free to post back here with additional information.

Thanks, TJ

it’s ok I gave up caring a long time ago and made my own camera system :slight_smile:

I’ve not checked it with the latest 4.3 version so I’ll give it a try later see if it’s any different and post my dxdiag.

Could well be my PC is a bit rubbish and could do with an upgrade. Specs off the top of my head are:

Nvida 470 GTX
q6600 2.4 ghz
4 gigs of ddr3 RAM

This only occurs when playing in a networked game using a SpringArm with Camera Lag enabled. The OP probably neglected to mention that part. It’s still present in the engine 4 years later, and can still be seen with the exact same steps to reproduce. Run the game as a dedicated server.

Necro :slight_smile:

I wasn’t running a networked game at all :slight_smile:

My problem was due to rubbish old hardware, got a new spunky machine and the problem went away so guess it was a frame rate problem for me. Probably a bit optimistic at the time thinking a gtx 470 was going to cut it :slight_smile:

Same, only stuttering in a networked game

I am still having the same problems in a networked game. Do you have a fix or a workarround?

Maybe its the network speed? Works fine for me on a decent rig and 80mb broadband.

Local host client

Probably not net speed then :slight_smile:

I know. It happens when camera lag variable is like 20+. RIE np at all, standalone and networked, jittering.

Hello, Thanks for sticking around SavageBeasty! (In reference to Necro)

Was just looking into this for a licencee, packaging the project looks to resolve this.

still happening :frowning: