I would like to position the camera and follow the airplane beside it.

The camera is in front of the airplane and not following it.

I tried this:

public class FollowPlayerX : MonoBehaviour
{
    public GameObject plane;
    private Vector3 offset = new Vector3(30,0,10);

    // Start is called before the first frame update
    void Start()
    {

    }

    // Update is called once per frame
    void Update()
    {
        transform.position = plane.transform.position + offset;
        transform.rotation = plane.transform.rotation;
        plane.transform.rotation = Quaternion.Euler(new Vector3(0,0,-90));
    }
}

I would like to position the camera and follow the airplane beside it.

The camera is in front of the airplane and not following it.

I tried this:

public class FollowPlayerX : MonoBehaviour
{
    public GameObject plane;
    private Vector3 offset = new Vector3(30,0,10);

    // Start is called before the first frame update
    void Start()
    {

    }

    // Update is called once per frame
    void Update()
    {
        transform.position = plane.transform.position + offset;
        transform.rotation = plane.transform.rotation;
        plane.transform.rotation = Quaternion.Euler(new Vector3(0,0,-90));
    }
}

• c#
• unity-game-engine
• rotation
• game-development

• You won't discover anything using only fixed values; you need to at least vary them to see the effect, if any; and if your terms of reference are correct. – Gerry Schmitz Commented 2 days ago
• why do you modify the rotation of the plane? – derHugo Commented yesterday

1 Answer 1

If your gameplay involves rotating the plane, a simple offset is not enough. You need to translate that offset relative to the planes rotation, and also rotate the camera to maintain the correct camera rotation.

Start by positioning your camera in the scene exactly how you want it.

We need variables for: the cameras direction (forward) vector (in the planes local space), and the position (also in the planes local space).

The Transform type gives us some handy functions to do these translations from/to local and world spaces. In this case we will use: InverseTransformDirection, TransformDirection for the cameras rotation, and InverseTransformPoint and TransformPoint for the cameras position.

[SerializeField] private Transform plane;

private Vector3 cameraPosition;
private Vector3 cameraLookDirection;

In Start we will get our cameras position and look direction by using the plane transform to translate into the local space of the plane.

private void Start()
{
    cameraPosition = plane.InverseTransformPoint(transform.position);
    cameraLookDirection = plane.InverseTransformDirection(transform.forward);
}

Then we apply them in Update by translating from the local space of the plane back to world space. For the cameras rotation we use Quaternion.LookRotation to convert the translated forward direction into a rotation.

private void Update()
{
    transform.position = plane.TransformPoint(cameraPosition);
    transform.rotation = Quaternion.LookRotation(plane.TransformDirection(cameraLookDirection));
}

Another option is to use Cinemachine, which is a package by Unity for handling the camera. It has a bit of a learning curve, but can do everything you can imagine. For super simple projects its a bit of overkill, but if you want to do cool cut scenes and more complex follow/switching etc, it is the better choice.