Why Virtual Cameras in Cinemachine are Amazing!
Objective: To discuss Virtual Cameras in Cinemachine and see how amazingly helpful they are in building your games sequences/animations.
Before ever knowing what Cinemachine was in Unity, I always had some plans for an indie game that I wanted to develop which incorporated some super immersive cut scenes and animations, and I honestly had no clue how I was going to achieve this. After spending a few hours in Cinemachine, I don’t need to look elsewhere! What a beast!!
Let’s start this new jewellery heist cinematography game by taking a look at one of most important components in Cinemachine, the Cinemachine Brain. Let’s take a look at how it functions and how it assists us with our virtual cameras.
What is Cinemachine Brain?
Cinemachine Brain is a component that gets added to the Main Camera in your scene and controls all the virtual cameras. The first time you add a virtual camera to the scene, the Cinemachine Brain component will automatically be added to your Main Camera.
Virtual Cameras in Cinemachine
Virtual cameras are not actually cameras. You can think of them more like a camera controller for driving the Unity Cameras position, rotation, post processing effects and lens settings. The virtual camera is intended to be attached to empty game objects in the scene, which can be easily enabled/disabled when required.
There are 3 states for virtual cameras - Live, Standby and Disabled.
When a CinemachineVirtualCamera component status is set to Live, it means that this virtual camera is now controlling the Unity Camera (which has the Cinemachine Brain attached to it).
The Standby status essentially means that this virtual camera isn’t controlling the Unity Camera (even though it is activated), however it will still continue to function by tracking and aiming at it’s target, updating every frame.
The Disabled status means that the virtual camera is no longer tracking/aiming at it’s target and is de-activated, which can be beneficial as it isn’t using any processing power.
Virtual cameras are very lightweight and can be inexpensive (if deactivated) as they don’t actually do any rendering in the scene. It is designed to track or follow interesting game objects positions/rotations or events with there generally being multiple cameras set up in a scene so that they can keep cutting/blending to each other when a player/game object moves out of/into view in a scene.
Here we can see in the game window that we are playing an animation of our character ‘Darren’ stealing the guards keycard, and in the Scene view we can watch the camera gizmo move from camera position 1 to camera position 2 through a blend sequence (notice the cameras staying fixated on their targets).
Next Up: Let’s take a look at the Virtual Cameras aiming features such as Aim, Body and Noise properties.
