Trouble blending between first-person Camera3D and PhantomCamera

[heyhrin]

Hi! I'm using the PhantomCamera addon in a first-person project and running into some issues. My setup involves a standard Camera3D on a Player (used for FPS movement and mouse look), and I want to switch between that and a PhantomCamera for third-person transitions.

I saw in another thread that you can disable a camera from reacting to PCams by turning off the host_layer, but that doesn’t work for my case. When I disable host_layer to return control to my Camera3D, a few things break:

• Mouse input becomes erratic or non-functional.
• The transition (tween) back to the Camera3D doesn’t happen because it's not a PCam.

Is PhantomCamera not designed with FPS setups in mind? Or is there a recommended way to blend between first-person and PhantomCams? I’m still new to Godot, so apologies if I’m missing something obvious.

Any help or direction would be appreciated — thanks!

phantomcamissue.mp4

[ramokz]

Is PhantomCamera not designed with FPS setups in mind? Or is there a recommended way to blend between first-person and PhantomCams?

No, there are no limitations like that, so it must be something that is going awry.

This may not be the solution, but worth trying first:

• Have you tried moving the Camera3D outside the player node? It shouldn't have an impact on recent addon releases, but am not sure if anything else is happening behind the scenes. If your FPS controller is using the rotation of the Player node, then that could very likely be the issue.
• Have you tried using another PCam as the FPS controller, e.g. one using Follow Mode Simple or Glued, rather than a DIY one?

Otherwise, if you can share a MRP, then that would make helping out a lot easier. It's a bit tricky to tell what and how everything is happening.

When there are no errors to debug, then it's just educated guesses, but that can quickly become a wild goose chase.

[heyhrin]

Have you tried moving the Camera3D outside the player node?

i did not try this as i think my current setup will not allow it without having dependencies outside the Player scene

—If your FPS controller is using the rotation of the Player node, then that could very likely be the issue.

ah ! yup that is how my script works. would you say turning off mouse input during a PCam override fix the rotation issue that occurs when we come back to Player Camera3D?

func _unhandled_input(event: InputEvent) -> void:
    if event is InputEventMouseMotion:
        rotate_y(-event.relative.x * SENSITIVITY)
        camera.rotate_x(-event.relative.y * SENSITIVITY)
        camera.rotation.x = clamp(camera.rotation.x, deg_to_rad(-80), deg_to_rad(80))

Have you tried using another PCam as the FPS controller

i tried using Follow/Glue but am unable to modify the rotation (yaw/pitch) to emulate a first person view. if i were to ditch my Player Camera3D altogether for a Player PCam, how should i go about overriding the transform of the PCam?

---

thank u for the swift reply ! while trying your suggestions, i've found that the issue may be due to my Player's headbobbing logic where it modifies the camera.transform.origin to emulate a headbob:

# player.gd
func _physics_process(delta):
	camera.transform.origin = _headbob(t_bob)

func _headbob(time) -> Vector3:
	var pos = Vector3.ZERO
	pos.y = sin(time * BOB_FREQ) * BOB_AMP
	pos.x = cos(time * BOB_FREQ / 2) * BOB_AMP
	return pos

i removed that temporarily for now to help narrow down the issue but came across a similar issue where upon turning off the PCamHost on my Player's Camera3D, it stays on the last active PCam's position and messes up the Camera3D's clamped rotation logic:

new.issue.mp4

i am toggling the PCamHost on and off by attaching this script to Area3Ds:

@onready var host_pcam = PhantomCameraManager.get_phantom_camera_hosts()[0]

# on body entered/exit signals here

func toggle_player_host_layer():
    if host_pcam.host_layers == 1:
        host_pcam.set_host_layers_value(1, false)
    elif host_pcam.host_layers == 0:
        host_pcam.set_host_layers_value(1, true)

files:
player.txt
player_old_headbob.txt
3d_trigger_interactible.txt
MRP via Google Drive

please let me know if you need to see more parts of the project !

[ramokz]

Thanks for sharing all of this, think I can see what is happening now.

A rule of thumb when using the addon is, if a scene has a PCam and a PCamHost set up, then the camera shouldn't be modified directly. Instead, all modifications should be done on the PCam, as it transfers its position (aka transform.origin), and rotation to the camera. This is obviously only the case when you have the host layers aligned between the PCam and PCamHost.

There is a first-person example scene that is probably worth digging into called 3d_noise_example_scene.tscn inside addons/phantom_camera/example_scenes/3D(-4.4). That should also give a better picture of how to set up Camera + PCam + PCamHost in general.

But to give a quick scene structure and logic reference suggestion, when your code is referring to %Camera3D.SOMETHING it should be %PlayerPhantomCamera3D.SOMETHING. So your player controller scene structure would look more like this:

When you're using a Follow Mode that isn't None, then you cannot manually override the position of the camera, as the Follow Mode logic now handles all positional properties and likewise for the rotation when Look At Mode is set.
When Follow Mode is set to None, then you can freely control the position of the PCam and conversely, setting Look At Mode to None means you can freely control the rotation of the PCam.

To your question about handling the rotation of the camera when using a PCam. It should just a case of referencing the PCam instead of the camera and applying your rotation logic to the PCam instead, while making sure the Look At Mode is set to None.

---

# player.gd
func _physics_process(delta):
	camera.transform.origin = _headbob(t_bob)

func _headbob(time) -> Vector3:
	var pos = Vector3.ZERO
	pos.y = sin(time * BOB_FREQ) * BOB_AMP
	pos.x = cos(time * BOB_FREQ / 2) * BOB_AMP
	return pos

The example mentioned at the top demonstrates this as well, but for this specifically, I would suggest checking out the Noise documentation. It essentially applies a noise, be it rotational or positional, to the camera that you can adjust to your liking. Which looks like what you're going for here as well?

---

@onready var host_pcam = PhantomCameraManager.get_phantom_camera_hosts()[0]

# on body entered/exit signals here

func toggle_player_host_layer():
    if host_pcam.host_layers == 1:
        host_pcam.set_host_layers_value(1, false)
    elif host_pcam.host_layers == 0:
        host_pcam.set_host_layers_value(1, true)

There are some, but very very few cases when you would ever want to disconnect the PCamHost from the PCam nodes; actually struggle with thinking of any. Because if one wanted to fully manually control the camera, then you can still achieve that by just transitioning to a PCam with no Follow Mode or Look At Mode set and then just control that. Given that also retains all the additional addon features, such as the aforementioned noise function.

[heyhrin]

thank you for the clear explanations !! i got it to work by moving the Camera3D outside and just setting the PlayerPCam's transform equal to my Player pivot point's transform in physics_process:

pcamfixyay.mp4

# player.gd
# i apply my mouse movement logic to the %Head node
# and make PlayerPCam's transform same as %Head

func _physics_process(delta):
	first_person_p_cam.global_transform = head.global_transform

---

i guess what really got me confused was that: placing the Camera3D outside of my Player scene goes against the structure i'm familiar with, having only watched a couple of "FPS controller for beginners" videos haha. i can't wait to tinker with this, it's a great tool !!

ah, and last question: as far as u can tell, would there be a noticeable difference or trade-off if i did it this way wherein i constantly sync the two transforms, rather than if i just set PlayerPCam's Follow Mode to Player?

[ramokz]

i guess what really got me confused was that: placing the Camera3D outside of my Player scene goes against the structure i'm familiar with, having only watched a couple of "FPS controller for beginners" videos

In a typical non-addon camera system what you were doing wasn't wrong. However, the addon is designed to control the camera node as a separate entity. Where you can pass the camera around to different points in space and to allow dampened, or gradual, movement to the camera whenever the PCam's position or rotation is changed. Both of those cases would be very difficult to achieve if the camera was a child of the player node, as the player's node transforms then starts fighting with the virtual camera system. Games, first-person games may be the exception here, rarely attach the camera to the target directly as it removes a lot of flexibility that the developer may want to have with the camera. Cases where, e.g., moving the camera doesn't move fully 1:1, pixel by pixel, when the playable character moves.

Tutorial-wise, it might be worth either looking up ones about Phantom Camera specifically, or Unity's Cinemachine, which has a lot of tutorials out there. The addon is based on the same principles as Cinemachine, so their approach to things, in many ways, carries over to this addon as well.

ah, and last question: as far as u can tell, would there be a noticeable difference or trade-off if i did it this way wherein i constantly sync the two transforms, rather than if i just set PlayerPCam's Follow Mode to Player?

There shouldn't be any inherent differences. You're essentially replacing Follow Mode system with your own, which is perfectly fine, but it does mean that any addon specific features such as damping wouldn't be possible; unless you remade it yourself. So it really comes down to what result you're looking for and what features you want to use. Follow Mode merely just simplifies the positional logic so you wouldn't have to do it yourself. The addon does also do a few behind-the-scenes stuff, but that might not be applicable to your project.