Issue with camera boom fidgeting

A problem has been persisting my game for the past few days. Basically, I have a Blueprint-only third person game with a camera attached to a spring arm component. It worked fine for a while, but for some reason, now, the camera “fidgets” when I’m standing still. About every two seconds while my character isn’t moving, it just suddenly zooms in right up to my character’s head, sometimes clipping through, then zooms back out in about a fraction of a second. For the life of me, I can’t figure out why this happening, nor can I remember when it first appeared.

I’ve been unable to reproduce the problem in a separate project, but here are some things I discovered:

  • It only occurs when the character is not moving. It doesn’t do it when the character is walking or falling down.
  • The issue persists even after disabling Blueprints related to my character and changing the skeletal mesh to something other than what I currently have.
  • The fidgeting stops if I uncheck “do collision test” on the camera boom.

Is there a way to determine what the camera does collision tests against? I’m completely stumped on this, and it’s tempting to do the last option to hotfix it. Any help would be appreciated.

… I’ve been adjusting spring arms in 417 and 418 this last couple of months… and there hasn’t been any unusual behavior at with spring arm collision and jittering (I use “test for collision” on always).

One thing, did you try in the same project… but on a new level? It kind of sounds like there might be an object with collision (yes, I had this issue that puzzled me briefly, when the collision of a static mesh was way outside its boundaries)

Anyway, I know it’s a bit unlikely… sorry I can’t be more helpful

I came back to this with a clear head and I figured out the problem. It was indeed another object messing with the camera boom.

So my game has two follower party members, but there were some parts in the game where you could travel alone. I had forgotten since it’s been a while since I coded this aspect of the game (most likely from several UE4 versions ago), but apparently, the way I was having the player travel “alone” was by turning these party members invisible. Somehow, the invisible party members were blocking the camera and causing it to fidget.

While I definitely need to investigate further on my own end, for now this solved my issue. Thanks!

great! happy you solved it… good luck on your project :slight_smile: