Nexus Bodycam

NEXUS Bodycam

Turn Minecraft into a first-person bodycam experience. Mount the camera on your chest and feel every step, every breath, every hit — with professional-grade lens effects, depth of field, and full weapon realism integration.

NEXUS Bodycam is a client-side camera overhaul for Minecraft Java Edition 1.20.1 (Fabric). It rebuilds the first-person camera from the ground up using a real-time temporal effects engine: footsteps synced to the actual in-game audio, physically-modelled springs, Perlin-driven idle micro-tremor, realistic breathing with sound, damage and landing shakes, and a complete post-processing lens pipeline (fisheye, chromatic aberration, vignette, lens dirt, film grain, depth of field).

Everything is fully configurable in-game through a scrollable config screen with eight presets — from a subtle documentary feel to full EXTREME shake, plus dedicated looks for documentary, horror, tactical and raw GoPro footage.

Camera Effects — feel the ground

• Audio-synced footsteps — the camera bounces exactly once per footstep, locked to Minecraft's own step sounds (not a guess-timer). Walk, sprint, strafe: the cadence always matches what you hear.
• Step smoothing & landing damping — a vertical spring absorbs stair steps, slab edges and jumps so the horizon never jerks.
• Rotational landing jolt — land from a cliff and the camera kicks in pitch and rolls side-to-side, proportional to the fall. Damping is configurable.
• Realistic head bob — smooth cosine-based bobbing with phase locking (no visual pops), vertical + roll + yaw components. Vanilla bobbing can be fully disabled to avoid double motion.
• Idle micro-tremor — a subtle Perlin noise shake plus an 8 Hz GoPro-style micro-vibration that scales with movement, so the camera never feels dead.
• Sprint lean & strafe lean — the camera tilts into turns (up to 1.8°) and leans when strafing, with yaw inertia: the view lags your mouse slightly, like a device hanging on a vest.
• Real roll — true banking injected into the world render matrix (not a fake rotation), clamped ±10°.
• Chest camera mode — offset the camera down to chest height with a pitch tilt and wide-FOV multiplier for a true vest-mounted perspective.

Breathing System — you can hear it

• Synchronized breath audio — a 3.06 s breath cycle with the exhale starting exactly at the midpoint, matched to the included breath-in-out sound (mono OGG). Visuals and audio stay locked together.
• Asymmetric breathing shape — quick inhale, smooth exhale, plus Perlin irregularity (real breathing isn't a perfect sine).
• Exhaustion from sprinting — keep running and your breathing rate ramps: +35% after 5 seconds, up to +65% after 20 seconds (progressive). Sound volume and pitch rise with exhaustion; it resets when you stop.
• Smart gating — you only hear and feel heavy breathing when it makes sense: standing still = calm, walking = mostly gated, exhausted = heaving.

Damage & Impact

• Damage shake — any drop in health triggers a short Perlin burst on yaw/pitch, scaled by the damage amount (clamped so one hit doesn't nauseate you).
• Landing impact — vertical sink + rotational spring (pitch and alternating per-foot roll): bigger fall, bigger jolt.

Post-Processing Lens Pipeline (Post-FX)

A custom core shader runs at the tail of the world render, with every parameter exposed in the config:

• Fisheye / barrel distortion (K1, K2 coefficients) — the signature bodycam look.
• Wide FOV multiplier — push the field of view beyond vanilla limits.
• Radial chromatic aberration — red/blue fringing at the frame edges, like a cheap wide lens.
• Dual vignette — cinematic cosⁿ falloff plus a mechanical (rounded-rectangle) vignette with adjustable floor and center gain.
• Lens dirt / veiling glare — a real grime overlay texture modulates light bloom, so bright scenes reveal the smudges on your lens.
• Film grain — sensor-style grain with configurable strength and cell size, quantized at ~30 fps for an authentic recording feel.
• True depth of field — a 17-tap Gaussian blur pass (per-screen copy, no feedback loops) used for the config menu background; the menu UI renders sharp on top of the blurred scene.

Realistic Water

• Surface waves with height, speed and frequency controls.
• Procedural caustics and foam on the surface.
• Refraction through the water plane.
• Underwater fog + tint — RGB tint and density controls for that murky first-person dive.

Full TACZ Integration (optional)

If TACZ - Timeless and Classics Zero is installed, NEXUS Bodycam adds visual-only gun realism (never touches raycasts, bullets or sights):

• Gun spring — a second-order spring on the weapon model: flick 90° and it overshoots (~102°) before settling. Tunable intensity, speed and overshoot.
• Weapon lowering spring — the gun eases down when idle and rises smoothly.
• Run sway — the weapon lags and sways while sprinting.
• Recoil kick — a decaying kick on the gun model when firing (sprint-fire triggers a light kick too).
• Global view smoothing — the rendered camera follows your mouse with exponential smoothing (visual only; your real aim is untouched).

Without TACZ, all TACZ mixins are disabled automatically — the mod loads normally.

Shader Compatibility (Iris / OptiFine)

• Designed to work alongside bodycam-style shaderpacks: the mod owns the camera motion, the shader owns the lens look — no double-processing.
• Sync with Shader (default ON): detects an active shaderpack and reduces shake/bob amplitude to avoid double motion sickness, and reports motionBlurBoost / swayIntensity to the shader through an Iris compatibility bridge.
• Shadow passes are detected and skipped, so post-FX never corrupts shadow rendering.

Configuration

Open the config screen from Mod Menu (or the in-game controls). The screen is scrollable with a compact adaptive layout and a blurred background, organized in categories:

• Smoothing — step smoothing, landing damping, view smoothing
• Shaking — idle shake amount & frequency
• Bobbing — bobbing amount, frequency, roll lean
• Weapon & View — TACZ spring, lowering, run sway, recoil, view smooth
• Camera — chest camera, height, pitch, wide FOV
• Post-FX — fisheye K1/K2, vignette, chromatic aberration, lens dirt, grain
• Water — waves, caustics, refraction, underwater fog & tint
• Compatibility — sync with shader, disable vanilla bobbing

Presets: Subtle · Normal · Intense · EXTREME (with a motion-sickness warning) · Documentary · Horror · Tactical · Raw GoPro.

Each preset tunes motion, optics, exposure, glow, lens dust and the critical overlay in one click:

• Documentary — steady handheld: mild bob/inertia, FOV 1.10, light chromatic aberration.
• Horror — unstable sensor: heavy idle shake (1.2 Hz), deep vignette, grain and dust pushed up.
• Tactical — readable sight picture: minimal wobble (idle 0.12), flat lens, effects kept out of the way.
• Raw GoPro — widest lens: FOV 1.40, strong fisheye (K1 0.32), visible chromatic aberration.

Settings save to config/bodycam.json with validation — invalid or missing values fall back to safe defaults.

Technical Notes

• Fully frame-based: all effects run every rendered frame with real delta time (System.nanoTime, clamped), so behavior is identical at 20 or 200 FPS — even with heavy shaders.
• Client-side only — safe on any server, no server installation needed, no network traffic.
• Diagnostics: optional [diag] log line every 60 ticks (steps, cadence, breath rate, spring values) for debugging and tuning.
• Lightweight: a single singleton state object and a handful of mixins; no per-tick world scans.

Tested on (v1.4.2+1.20.1)

Measured in-game with every Post-Effect enabled:

Installation

1. Install Fabric Loader for Minecraft 1.20.1.
2. Drop NEXUS-bodycam-1.4.2+1.20.1.jar into your mods folder.
3. (Optional) Install Mod Menu to access the config screen from the mods list, and TACZ for weapon realism.

Requirements: Fabric Loader ≥ 0.15.11 · Minecraft 1.20.1 · Fabric API. Mod Menu and TACZ are optional.

Compatibility

Scope of the mod

NEXUS Bodycam changes only how the camera feels and looks. It does not modify movement speed, hitboxes, raycasts, server logic, or any gameplay balance — it is a pure immersion/visual mod.

Third-Party Credits & Acknowledgements

NEXUS Bodycam is built for the Minecraft modding ecosystem and acknowledges the developers and contributors behind the third-party projects listed below. These projects are independent of NEXUS Bodycam and retain their own authorship, licenses, and distribution terms.

Dependencies & Integrations

• Fabric Loader — FabricMC contributors. Mod-loading platform.
• Fabric API — FabricMC contributors. Required modding library.
• Mod Menu — Mod Menu contributors. Optional configuration-screen integration.
• TaCZ — Timeless and Classics Zero — TaCZ developers and contributors. Optional weapon-animation and visual integration.

Rendering & Compatibility

• Iris Shaders — Iris developers and contributors. Shader compatibility and integration support.
• Sodium — JellySquid and Sodium contributors. Rendering optimization and compatibility within the supported mod ecosystem.
• Distant Horizons — Distant Horizons developers and contributors. Compatibility support.

Attribution & Licensing

All third-party projects remain the property of their respective authors and are governed by their own licenses and distribution terms. Please consult each project's official page or source repository for full licensing information.

NEXUS Bodycam does not claim authorship of these projects. Compatibility, integration, or acknowledgement does not imply endorsement by their developers. Unless explicitly stated otherwise, these mods are separate downloads and are not included in the NEXUS Bodycam distribution.

Any third-party code, assets, textures, sounds, or other materials distributed with NEXUS Bodycam must retain the applicable permissions, notices, and license requirements. Shaderpacks used alongside NEXUS Bodycam are independent projects and should be credited to their respective creators.

Minecraft is a trademark of Mojang Studios and Microsoft. NEXUS Bodycam is an independent project and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Mojang Studios or Microsoft.

License: GPL-3.0-ONLY
Source code: Source Code
Made for: Minecraft Java 1.20.1 · Fabric · client-side

Disclosures

AI-GENERATED CONTENT: Most code and assets are AI-generated, with some code written by the project creator.

PHOTOSENSITIVITY WARNING: This project may contain flashing lights.

Disclaimer

Nexus-Bodycam is not affiliated with, associated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Nexus Mods.

Nexus-Bodycam is an independent project and has no official connection to the Nexus Mods platform or its operators.

All trademarks and names belong to their respective owners.

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