Wow how the little things are missed. Why on earth they removed it is beyond me. Remember how you could hold the middle mouse button down and move the mouse to see your character at any angle, even while running? Well Skyrim has removed this functionality. As far as I know, in Skyrim third person you can only rotate the camera when you have no weapon drawn and you don't have to hold the middle mouse button down. But once you are moving or draw a weapon or ready magic the camera is forced to behind your character.

I used to love watching my character run from the side or sometimes do a 180 and stroll down the sidewalk in Oblivion, and use it for cool screenshots. So I'm hoping someone can make a mod that does this. I've never really modded the camera so I have no clue where to start on this. I searched all the camera mods on the nexus and found nothing that did this either.

While it doesn't fix everything, for screenshots you can use the console command "tfc 1" without the quotes to freeze frame all the action on screen and enable a free moving camera.

It's quite nice.

But that said, I do hate how there's no way to casually rotate the camera without using the console when you have your weapons drawn.

Still, the addition of the console command I mentioned DOES partially make up for it, as it allows for awesome screenshots to be taken with relative ease.

Well mostly I liked using it to watch my characters walk from the front view, or to watch horse riding from the side, etc. See who's behind me for a second it is a game play thing. I know about TFC but even that seems jittery and messed up (moves way too fast) compared to Oblivion. I haven't tried TFC 1 like you have suggested maybe that will make it smoother.

Is the camera stuff hard coded or is that something that can be adjusted with a mod or ini tweak? I know you can change the camera angle and distance with ini tweaks, maybe there is a way to re enable the rotating camera with tweaks?

This has been getting on my nerves too. I really miss being able to look around without turning around.

The "1" parameter freezes the game. There's also a console command that changes the speed of the free camera. I don't think this can be fixed by a simple INI tweak, if it can be fixed at all. Very annoying indeed.

Oh, I could not agree more with this. I too used to love rotating the camera as my character walked. It was the first thing I tried to modify via .ini tweaks when the game came out, but with no success. Even though we now know all the extended variables for Skyrim.ini, none of them seem to affect what we are looking for.

I have a feeling that the way the camera now rotates around your character is indeed hard coded and can never be fixed - and unless the Creation Kit can open up some new doors, the old style 'Vanity Camera' seems to be gone forever.

Holding down F also lets me rotate the camera around with my weapon drawn.

This is pretty cool, but you still can't rotate the camera around while you are moving like you could in Oblivion. Unless I just don't know how to do it.

It's a pity no-one seems to have attempted fixing this so far.