Hope this is the right forum for this. I bought VRChat+ the other day specifically for the camera dolly and drone features as I needed those tools to help me record some content for some creators I work with. After spending about 8-10hrs with the two new features I can say they are nice, but they are also incredibly frustrating in a handful of ways and leave a lot to be desired. I do feel like there is so much potential in these tools and figured I’d share some of my feedback and let others share theirs, as well as suggestions for some tweaks/additional options that would make these new features really powerful creator tools.
Most of these suggestions/feedback are Camera Dolly Specific, ones that apply for the drone as well will be labeled with [+D].
===Ability to set total time for a path
We have the ability to adjust speed by flyspeed or time between points by seconds - but those both can feel really rough and not particularly useful in many types of shots. It is made more difficult by the fact that adding easing sometimes will give you better/smoother pathing along your route, but can also really impact timing. For certain types of content (music videos for example) a shot needs to be constrained to a specific length of time and have a consistant speed across an entire route. No matter how many time’s I would adjust various settings I always found myself fighting the camera system or making compromises just to get close enough to what I needed. Its made worse by the fact that by adding more points you tend to get a smoother or more accurate path, but this increases the total time of the route, and often causes movement between points to feel very choppy or inconsistent . Having the ability to also route to run and adjust to a specified length would be incredibly helpful.
===Ability to cycle between points on your route through the menu
*Due to how smooth the pathing decides to be or evolving creative visions, I have often found that I will need to adjust specific points in a route. The problem is many times these points are in high up or difficult to get to places. This means I have to constantly adjust avatar height or swap to an avatar that has the ability to fly. Sometimes its such a minor thing of changing angles or a speed/focus value which can be rather annoying to work with by having to physically grab the camera in the overworld. Having the ability to cycle between set points on the little PDA tool and adjust their values or remove the point all together from there would save a ton of time and help streamline the process of setting up a path significantly.
===OPTION TO REMOVE THE CAMERA SWING/INERTIA! [+D]
Sorry for the all caps but this is one thing that really made things difficult for me. A handful of times I needed (or wanted) to do top down shots with semi-fast circular pan around the subject. I will go through and map out a circular path focusing down on a single specific point. As the camera runs the path it seems the lens suddenly has physical properties and is affected by centrifugal force causing the focal point to shift to a completely different spot. It doesn’t matter if smoothing or any kind of easement is turned on or off to any degree. If I’m making a camera route and have a specific point centered in all key frames, I very much want and expect that specific point to be centered. As far as the drone goes, it can be very rough to use as a camera tool because the constant shifts in framing when you go forwards, backwards, or strafe completely change the angle of your framing.
==Improvements to Focus (Change focus speed / Change focus between points)
Many times for establishing shots or someone new entering a scene you want the ability use a wide open aperture and shift focus between points or subjects. Neither the camera dolly or the drone handle this transition well. The default transition between focal points is way to fast and jarring. When focusing on something close up and then shifting to something farther away its basically an instant transition and looks terrible. When focused on something father away and shifting closer its slightly more gradual. I have had to use some workaround where to get a smoother more appealing/cinematic transition I have to focus on something farther away, do the slightly smoother transition to closer object then reversing the footage in post. This only works situationally though and really is only a viable option in establishing shots when rain or other weather effects arent present. Having the ability to have smoother focus transitions would immensely help towards more cinematic filming. Additionally changing focal points between points in a route is really inconsistent and wonky. You can’t do it with auto or semi-auto at all. If you change where the focus circle lies on the camera at all it will adjust that to be the focus point for all points of the route - not just the specific node you’re adjusting. You can kind of do it using full manual controls using focal depth, but that’s really not ideal for wider aperture shots in motion or tracking a subject in motion. I should just be able to adjust the focal point for each individual point in a route.
==Ability to focus on or track a subject [+D]
I know and appreciate the fact that we have the “focus on me” setting, but we really need to be able to extend that to focus on subject (other players) or focus on object/point. Kind of goes along with the previous suggestion, but being able to focus on other players would be huge. To me it feels like this tool was designed more for the solo streamer or solo youtuber doing things for themselves, and not for the camera crew who might work with a streamer/youtuber or someone who wants to do more filmlike content with multiple people. Being able to set paths centered on specific subjects, especially if you could specific the total run duration of the path (first suggestion) would be massive.
==Y-Axis movement option for camera dolly
*The drone has the ability to move up and down along the Y-axis and the camera dolly really could benefit from this too. Its 100% a skill issue, but I suck with the drone and have trouble getting consistent speeds along certain movement paths. Trying to set up vertical panning with the camera dolly would be a much better option and would be more versatile with being able to integrate it into repeatable paths, but not having the ability to move along the Y-axis in the camera fly mode makes setting up straight shots very tedious.
==Drone-like control for Camera dolly
The drone is nice but they can be difficult to use and have a bit of a learning curve. When I saw that drones were added to VR chat i was surprised that you added actual drones with simulated physics - I was expecting it to be more along the lines of a floating camera. That being said it would be really useful/helpful to have a designated mode for flying camera or a bit more settings. Similar to whats above, having ability to move along the Y-axis but maybe have acceleration settings, ability to do rolls or steep turns, that kind of thing. Basically a flying camera that has the full functionality of drone, but without any of the actual drone physics.
==Drone FPV Look / Focus / Steer by look
Many drones have the ability for the camera to move independently from the steering and direction the drone is actually moving. It would be nice to be able to have a couple different modes where you could fly the drone with the control sticks, or along a prerecorded path, and then control the camera with you headset by looking in that direction. Would make it a lot more usable for filming and could be built upon to be really advanced where if the headset supports eye tracking you could use the general look direction for camera angles and the eye tracking for focus point. Would also be nice if there was an alternate steering mode that made use allowing you to control steering direction with the headset.
==Draw / Record / Drag paths
This is one that would be more of a nice to have. The pathing of the camera can be really rough to work with at times. It would be nice if there was a pen tool that you could draw a path with or if you could record a path with the drone or camera fly mode and the camera would just follow that path. Alternatively if the path had a toggle to be intractable where you could grab it and drag it to help customize and smooth it out that would be a great help.
Closing thoughts
The camera dolly feature is really nice, but as it currently is I find it very difficult to actually work with and it feels a bit more like a toy than a tool. I find myself most of just using the dolly camera in fly mode and manually controlling it that way which IMO kind of defeats the purpose. I understand that the dev time it would take to add some of those features would be pretty high but I fully believe they’d make these tools so much more useful for content creation than they are right now - and for someone like myself this kind of tool is what would compel me to subscribe to VRChat+, but I feel that it isn’t really quite there yet. Maybe some of these things already exist and I just missed them while looking over the available videos/documentation for the features and I am a fool, in that case I’m sorry for the rant.
[if needed I can elaborate on specific points if my description was sub par or try to include video/screenshots in followup posts if that would be more useful]