I want to make a camera have lag when it looks at a moving subject.
Naturally a cameraman would not target like a robot there's missing a delay so I'm looking for a way for when a subject moves the camera would need to catch up with it.

I'm thinking of attaching a short cloth to the subject at one end and make the camera follow whatever is dangling from the cloth at the other end.
I just thought of this idea now and have to brush up on my cloth physics.
Can I bake a camera motion then place it delayed on the timeline?

Unless, does someone else has another way to automate a camera this way?

Not sure if this is what you want.
I attached camera to the spine of a character. Then I applied an idle motion to the character.
All the rest is just tweaking his torso on a timeline (you can apply various curve presets as desired). And camera is tweaked only to zoom in and out.
All is done in preview camera mode, while watching the main camera plane in mini-viewport.

Here's an idea to try. If you have one of the spring antenna props, attach a cube to last bone of its skeleton. That would be the top of the antenna. Select the antenna and set its spring settings to all minimum, sliders to the left. Attach the antenna to your character. Have the camera look at the cube at the top of the antenna.

With all settings at minimum, the spring will simply stretch a bit as the character moves, and then pull back to normal as it catches up with the character.

I wrote up a request for an improved "Look At" feature a long time ago.

I really hate the unnatural spot-on tracking that "Look At" creates.  We should be able to basically enter in "tolerance and damping" values to let the camera lag some, like Dragonskunk explained.

I wrote that up a longgggg time ago.  I wonder if it is in Feedback Tracker or was only in the forum.  I'll have to look.
(UPDATE - I looked, couldn't find anything from my in Feedback Tracker on that topic.  I wonder if I can find my old post.)


MORE UPDATE...

Here is a post where I link to an example of what I'd like:  https://forum.reallusion.com/FindPost360587.aspx
When I wrote that, I sure believed I had written up a formal request.  I might have "formally" written it before FBT was born, or else they're having a database issue and that's why I'm having trouble finding my request.  I'll keep looking...

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iClone 7... Character Creator... Substance Designer/Painter... Blender... Audacity...
Desktop (homebuilt) - Windows 10, Ryzen 9 3900x CPU, GTX 1080 GPU (8GB), 32GB RAM, Asus X570 Pro motherboard, 2TB SSD, terabytes of disk space, dual  monitors.
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I though of an idea.

Add another avatar.
Give it the same motion as the subject you want the camera to follow.
Make it invisible.
Delay the animation from the visible subject you want to track.
Now the camera will have a natural delay.

@Justaviking I think what would work best with a camera is a speed limiter like this dialog:
Max rotation speed: [_2.0_] degrees per frame
I remember my tripod having a turning resistance of the pivot and tilt, it had a friction device that gave smooth transitions.

@Rampa I'll try that, see what happens and reply here.

@4u2ges I don't know what you are trying to explain.

Probably easiest just to set an ease-in transition curve on the constraint key for the camera, but it's not automatic.

A looking at camera has no keys.
What?

Guess I didn't think that one through well enough!

I thought some sort of automatic rig would be more interesting too. The target on the spring chain was the the first thing I thought of.

>@4u2ges I don't know what you are trying to explain.<

What I have shown is a concept. Idea was not mine. I saw it first when thedirector1974 implemented it in his Alien clip. That was a brilliant walk into the command center.

https://forum.reallusion.com/FindPost361116.aspx
https://forum.reallusion.com/FindPost362530.aspx

OK, you said you do not want to have a robotic camera behavior. But the constrain (delay or no delay) gives you exactly that. Camera does point to one specific bone and following it with robotic precision. And if you have a delay with second invisible character, it is going to be a precise delay. Sometimes a camera man is trying to predict the next actor' movement and pan the camera in that direction. Now you have an advance instead of delay. Sometimes he does "overshoot" - trying to follow but gets slightly ahead. I do not see any way of doing that in iClone unless you manually key it and add an element of randomness. Spring by Rampa might work, but I want to see it.
My idea was, first to add a *shaky randomness*. If cameraman is holding a camera and is trying to following the subject there would always be a subtle shaking in all direction. So I attached a camera to a character spine, applied an idle motion to the character (you do not see that character because he is "holding" a camera).  There are plenty of different idle motions are out there, from subtle to energetic (subtle would work best I suppose). They can be extended, looped, smoothed.. etc. Once you have that in place, you begin animating the *camera* by rotating the torso of the *cameraman*, or moving him for panning, or he can even walk as thedirector1974 made him to. You roughly point the camera toward the actor on a timeline and the idle motion would do the job of delaying, overshooting, etc. Or you can do that with transition curves for the *cameraman* motion keys as you see it appropriate. Lot of work? Maybe. So feel free to use it of dump it

So this is with the default spring of the antenna thingymabob. It's a linear spring. That means the bones only move on X and Y. You can also set the spring to rotational in 3DX. Then it gets pretty drunk looking. There is a lot of variability adjusting the three spring sliders. This one is pretty tame, with no bounciness. Left it visible to show what's going on. Camera is targeting the sphere.