Cursor-Driven Camera Movement with React Three Fiber & maath A short technical walkthrough on building custom camera animations using React Three Fiber and the pmndrs maath library — useful groundwork for anyone building more advanced camera effects for interactive 3D scenes.

The tutorial covers two approaches: 🎥 Position-based movement — animating the camera's position toward a target using maath's damp3 easing function 🎥 Rotation-based movement — keeping the camera position fixed and instead animating rotation with dampE, which holds up better in more complex scenes where moving the camera itself gets messy

Both techniques respond to cursor position in real time, and the same logic can be extended to animate meshes, not just the camera.

I built this from scratch — a blank Vite + React project up through a working cursor-reactive camera scene with a custom 3D model swapped in from Sketchfab.

If you're getting started with camera work in R3F, this is a good foundation. 📖 Full tutorial: https://sudeeptobose.medium.com/basic-3d-camera-movement-with-react-three-fiber-and-maath-library-4b060bfe7c5c 🔗 Live demo: https://basic-camera-tutorial.vercel.app/