How to Create the Hand-Held Look in Unity Using Cinemachine Virtual Cameras Noise Setting

3 min readJan 18, 2022

Objective: To create the hand held look and shaky feel of someone holding a phone/camera in real life using the noise setting in Cinemachines Virtual Cameras.

This is a pretty cool feature, and the best part about it is that it literally takes seconds to setup! So let’s make this nice and quick and test out a few different types of hand held options available.

Understand the Noise Setting in Cinemachine Virtual Camera

This feature is used to create random movement (camera shake) for the virtual camera which is a technique called ‘Perlin Noise’.

Let’s Get It Setup

Let’s add a virtual camera to our scene first, ‘Cinemachine’ tab → ‘Create Virtual Camera’. Now, let’s take a look in the Inspector and head down to the ‘Noise’ setting:

Noise setting in CinemachineVirtualCamera component

When we now click on the drop down box next to it, you will notice we only have 1 choice available so click on that:

We are are now met with a small error, which is simply letting us know that we don’t have a profile yet and we must choose one from the ‘Noise Profile’ drop down box: