Vertical movement smooth for 3rd person camera

When you're running on uneven terrain (especially inside caves or stairs), character is bouncing up and down, and because vanilla camera is rigidly following character your eyes may be tired very fast looking at shaking\bouncing screen. So I've made this little mod to make 3rd person camera move smoothly in vertical direction following character. Character will still bouncing like crazy while running on rocks but not the camera. Note that smoothness is aplied only to vertical direction (up-down) in rest camera behave as usual.
Ideally it would be great to make character and NPC walk smoothly on uneven terrain - without so much bouncing, but problem is in collisions, so if we will smooth character movement his legs could clip with meshes which isn't good. So for now smooth camera is best solution.





How exactly mod is working.

 It's very simple mod - no scripts and no impact on performance. It's just replacement for vanilla skeletons with smooth camera feature. If you want to use some skeleton mods like XPMSE and wish to use my mod I could create kinda XPMSE feature patch, but I'm not sure if I am allowed to do so. I never uploaded mods on nexus so I don't know much about rules using others mods. But I've tested my smooth camera on XPMSE skeleton and it's seems like working without any issues. So if you want me to create patch for XMPSE mod just tell me via PM I will update my mod providing feature  patch.

Or you can do it by yourself pretty much easily. Here is short instruction.

How to add smooth camera feature to custom skeletons (XMPSE)
Make sure to create back up of your files. I've tested my mod on vanilla Skyrim, so there may be incompatibilities with other mods.

You will need Nifscope.

1. Download mod, extract archieve. Open any skeleton provided by mod in Nifscope.
Find Camera3rd [Cam3] node, expand it and there you will find BSLagBoneController node -> right click -> block -> copy. Don't close Nifscope!

2. Open XPMSE skeleton you want to edit with another Nifscope instance.
In your XMPSE skeleton find Camera3rd [Cam3] node -> right click -> block -> paste. And then save your file.

You can tweak camera smootheness by editing BSLagBoneController properties.
 Play with different numbers untill you satisfied.
Linear Velocity  - how fast camera will reach it's destination - lesser number = smoother camera movement. Best results it's seems gives range between 1-2.
Maximum Distance  - how far camera allowed to lag from character.
Linear Rotation  - It's better to set to 0.

 

Here is video showing my mod working on XPSE-HDT skeleton with physics:




Known issues

My mod does smooth camera vertical movement while character is moving. It won't fix character bouncing when his collider capsule detects navmesh\object collision making character go up or down. Even small obstacle make character bump, to fix this one have to either edit navmeshes and object collision boxes to make terrain less bumpy in whole Skyrim (it's impossible task I think), or try to smooth character reacting on colliders by smoothing it's movement. But it may cause clipping through terrain and other issues. Anyway there is no easy way to fix all these issues. I managed to make camera vertical movement to be smooth but character is still bounces and at times it's looking really weird. I will see if I will find some way to reduce this, but don't expect ultimate solution because issue is too big to be fixed easily. 

There is camera bug I will try to fix. When entering forge or grindstone or other interactive devices camera is loosing focus on player for some reason. I will see what can be done to get rid of that bug.

Camera behavior while running stair and forge camera bug



I've tested my mod on vanilla Skyrim and didn't found any bugs yet, if you find any bugs please PM me.


Mod installation

Installation doesn't differs from any other simple mod - just drop files in data folder and overwrite files (don't forget to back up you files). 
Or better use any Mod Manager, just install my mod as usual, and be sure it's placed under any other skeleton replacer mods.

Updates

0.2 - Thanks to user DenSixSeven who pointed me to jumping camera bug while in sneak mode. I tweaked some parameters so I hope bug is fixed. Please redownload file.

Added optional file with smooth movement for character. Motion will be smooth but character will slide a bit when stopped. You can tweak smooth parameters in LagBoneController on NPC node of skeleton.