Unique Types of Body Settings in Virtual Cameras- Game Dev Series 175

Objective: introduce some unique and useful transposer from Follow function of virtual camera.

A fully functional following camera, there should be some useful tools that can make developers take less time on thinking of camera movement. You are right, there are some great tools in virtual camera are quite time saver.

In the last article, we had discovered a little bit deeper to Transposer. Now we will focus on other mode of Follow.

Hard Lock to Target

This one is simple to use. As its name, it will hard lock on the target and follow the movement. You can imagine it as the fixed angle from racing game or any types of game that you do not need to change the view point.

Framing Transposer

Framing Transposer is quite similar to Transposer. The biggest difference is as you can see the panel view above, which has pretty much the same panel as Aim function. Framing Transposer you can use in 2.5D platformer game, which allows you to focus on Player easily with all the Look At and Follow function within one setting panel.

3rd Person Follow

A 3rd person camera is quite common to see in games these days. There are tons of 3rd person shooter/action games you can find as the reference. And so, this is a convenient setting to allow you creating a 3rd person themed game with Cinemachine.

The highlight of 3rd Person Follow would be the Rig part.
If you are familiar to 3rd person game, you would know the Shoulder Offset. This allows you to adjust the position that camera behind target.

You can easily to switch between left and right shoulder view by accessing Camera Side slider.

This method of Follow would be good enough to create a decent 3rd person game. However, if you want a rotation-free 3rd person game, there is a better option.

Orbital Transposer

This is slightly different from 3rd person camera but mostly you can still see your target shown in camera just like using 3rd person camera.

It is pretty much the same as default camera setting in World of Warcraft, which camera can easily moves around Player by using mouse control.

This setting would have a better result if assign the target to Look At.

You can also define the heading direction by selecting from drop down menu.

If you wish to create a game with freely rotating 3rd person camera, Orbital Transposer would be the best option.

Tracked Dolly

Dolly is a kind of camera equipment in cinematic industry. It provides a smooth and steady option to move your camera, which rely on a track.
When using Tracked Dolly, you also need to create a track for virtual camera.

First we need to add a component of track into game scene. The better way to get the dolly camera with track is add a new one from drop down menu of Cinemachine.

Then you would get a new virtual camera and a dolly track.

Let’s focus on dolly track. It’s basically based on a script called “CinemachineSmoothPath”.

In this script, you can define the setting of path and also reposition the waypoints, these would shape the whole part of dolly track.
For demonstration, I would create 3 waypoints to this track.

Let’s adjust these waypoints to make a curved track surrounding the target.
Each waypoint can be adjust independently with new position.

Once your track is finished setting, we can assign the target to our vcam on track to Follow and Look At. Then check Auto Dolly in Body setting of camera.

All done, let’s check the result of Dolly cam.