Cinemachine Refresher: Look At

Now that I’ve built a game quickly, I feel like it would be a good time to go back over some of the stuff I have worked on and look towards any new methods that I didn’t learn before, or just a refresher for what I have done. To start, I am going to look at Cinemachine and what it can offer the user within Unity.
We all know how to install and build in new cameras, but let’s take a look at some of the options within our virtual cameras:

What we can do with our camera is set it to either look at a target, or follow a target. To start, let’s take a look at the look at options and the Aim settings in our camera. When we have our camera look at the target, our virtual camera is looking at the target, keeping it in the middle of the screen:

Lookahead Settings

The first settings within the aim settings, aside from the offset, is the lookahead time and smoothing. This allows the camera to calculate where the target will be moving to and have the camera move ahead to that position:

Dampening

The next couple settings are dampening properties. What this alters is how responsive the camera is to following the object. The higher the number gets, the slower the camera will move:

Screen X Y

These settings adjust the rotation of the virtual camera around the selected axis. If we say want our camera to still have it’s focus on a central point, but adjust the rest of the area to look at, we would use this setting:

Dead and Soft Zones

Next up we are going to look at the adjustments of the zones within the camera’s view. First, we have a dead zone which we can create in the center of the screen with a clear area:

What we have created is a area in which if the object is within that zone, the camera will not follow it until it leaves the zone, which then it will start to follow our target:

As long as our target is out of the dead zone and within the blue (soft) zone, our camera will continue to follow the object. As for the soft zone and the red, no pass zone, what these indicate is the area in which the object can be within, or an area that the target will never enter:

As we can see, if we shrink our soft zone to nothing on the horizontal axis, our object will only go as far as the edge of the red area.

Bias X and Y

Finally, we have our Bias X and Y positions. These 2 settings allow us to move the target position of our camera away from the center of the soft zone without rotating the actual view of the camera:

And that’s the Aim portion of our virtual camera’s settings. With that all finished up, I’ll look over how the body works and how we can go about accessing the components within C# in a future article.