Creating shots for cut scenes with Cinemachine

Cinemachine is a modular suite of camera tools for Unity which give AAA game quality controls for every camera in your project. It has been designed to be the entire unified camera system in your project but can be used alongside your existing cameras as well.

Cinemachine virtual camera

The Virtual Camera is a shot, a single camera. It has child components which you can turn on to make it do things like procedurally track and compose objects, follow things and shake with procedural noise. Together they are a very powerful combination and can yield an unlimited number of results. More info Class CinemachineVirtualCamera.

It can drive the Unity’s Main Camera and control its position, orientation, lens settings, and PostProcessing effects.

A virtual camera is very lightweight, and does no rendering of its own. It merely tracks interesting GameObjects, and positions itself accordingly.

To create a new virtual camera, go to Cinemachine/Create virtual camera. We will need 2 virtual cameras, they can be named CM OverTheShoulder shot and CM MidShot

The game tab will look some like this

Soft zone — blue region: what you really want to focus on.

Dead zone — middle-center gray square: camera will stay in the same place until the focused object moves out of the dead zone.

Law of the thirds: 9 squares, no dead zone. Focused game object will be set with outer blue 4 corners.

Composing the shots

First we need to set the scene tab in the place we want to put, for example, the CM OverTheShoulder shot and press Ctrl+Shift+F or go to GameObject/Align with view.

Before:

Later

And now you can place the CM OverTheShoulder shot as you want.

This will be the first shot

Mid shot

To switch between CM shots use the Solo option

Cinemachine brain

It makes it possible to switch between virtual cameras.

Also it sets the main camera’s position and rotation in accordance with those virtual camera values. It becomes a Main Camera component after creating a virtual camera.