Introducing Cinemachine 2.7.1 (and 2.7.2)!

Unity Engine
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1

Hello friends!

We’re delighted to announce that Cinemachine 2.7.1 has now been officially published to Package Manager.

Note that 2.7.1 has not yet been verified, so approach it will appropriate caution. The 2.7 series, which will be the verified version for the upcoming 2021.1 and backwards compatible as far as 2019.4, includes some nice improvements which I’ll detail below. You can read the complete changelog here.

To add Cinemachine 2.7.1 to a project, open the Package Manager (Window > Package Manager), find Cinemachine in the list, and click Install on 2.7.1.

To add to a project that currently contains Cinemachine, open the Package Manager (Window > Package Manager), find Cinemachine, and click Update to 2.7.1.

In either case, don’t forget to check out the included Samples to see what Cinemachine can do!

Changes from 2.6.3 to 2.7.1

The first change - which might alarm you! - that you’ll notice right away is that the Cinemachine menu has vanished. Fear not, the functionality isn’t gone; we’re simply giving you back some top-level menu real-estate, and integrating Cinemachine more directly into traditional Unity workflows. Cinemachine objects are now created just like any other GameObject: from the GameObjects menu (and in all the other places that GameObjects are generally created).

Next, we’ve introduced a new and improved 2D confiner. CinemachineConfiner2D provides a way for the user to limit the camera into an area defined by a polygon. This is useful for ensuring that the camera moves only in ways that properly support your game.

The new confiner has a number of advantages over what came before. It’s faster, and better at dealing with damping in corners and undersized behavior (camera window is bigger than the original confining area). It also works with both Orthogonal and Perspective cameras.

Note that the confining area may not be precise everywhere due to computational costs, but it will be a close approximation. This is expected at edges that are not perfectly horizontal or vertical. Moreover, the extremities of acute angles may be hard to reach.

The next big items are a pair of often-requested lens improvements, allowing Cinemachine to control and report on more aspects of how the Camera behaves.

  • The Virtual Camera Lens can now override orthographic and physical camera settings.

  • The Virtual Camera Lens inspector now respects the display of Horizontal FOV from the Camera.

Finally (and not counting the usual batch of bug fixes), you’ll find a new option in the ImpulseListener called ApplyAfter. This allows you to choose whether a confiner also confines impulses and noise.

As always, we hope you get great use out of the new version and all these improvements. If you have any questions, problems, complaints, ideas, or praise, don’t hesitate to post in this forum! We always love to hear from our friends and users.

[EDIT]
We just released 2.7.2 with some incremental improvements.

Improvements to the new CinemachineConfiner2D, some new samples, and a list of bug fixes.

Details in the release notes.
[/EDIT]

4 Likes
2

Hi ,

With Unity 2020.1.14f1 and Cinemachine 2.7.1 , when i opt for " DOlly Camera with track",

1.The green tracks are not appearing , I am not able to draw a path where i want my camera to move.
2. The red camera for the main camera is not showing up

Can you please look into this and respond?

Thanks
Shayak

3

Thanks very much for the report @voyagecreations and welcome to the forum! In general, we recommend you create a separate thread for a support request. Putting all 2.7.1 support questions in this thread will get messy very fast. That said, I’ll ask the team to investigate.

4

@voyagecreations , can you please look at this thread:

Thank you.

5

Hello, I imported the package but I don’t see “Cinemachine” in my game object menu? What might cause that?

6

See the “Changes from 2.6.3 to 2.7.1” section part-way down the post.

1 Like
7

Hello @Gregoryl ,
How safe is it to upgrade Cinemachine on Unity2019.3.9 ?
I was actually looking for a solution about my “2d polygon confiner with perspective camera issue” and this update came out ^^

8

Thanks.

9

Well, we only test on the LTS version of 2019 so no guarantees, but my gut feeling is that you should be ok.

1 Like
10

Hello! I’m brand new to trying Unity, and have got myself into a pickle.

TLDR: I have 165 CS0246 errors I don’t know how to correct
I am following the Unity tutorial for creating the John Lemon game found here:John Lemon's Haunted Jaunt: 3D Beginner - Unity Learn

I followed every step and everything was fine and working up until “The Camera” tutorial section introducing the Cinemachine.

The tutorial mentions selecting the “Cinemachine” drop-down menu from the top menu and selecting the “create virtual camera” option. The “Cinemachine” drop-down menu should be between the “Component” and “Window” drop-down menus. However, in my Unity version, there was no such option. “Component” and “Window” were next to each other, and “Cinemachine” was nowhere to be found.

I am using Unity version “2019.4.5f1 Personal”, and the beginning of the tutorial let me select the version I am using as “2019.4”, so I figured it was the same, but apparently not. I looked through some online info about the Cinemachine and discovered there was a version 2.7.1 update that moved it to the “GameObject” menu, but it was not there either. I think I had version 2.5.0, or something - I’m not sure how to check the prior version I had. The same page mentioned how to update my Cinemachine to version 2.7.1 by using the “Package Manager”, which I proceeded to install.

That worked, and I now had the Cinemachine in the “GameObject” menu and I was able to continue with the tutorial.

After setting up the virtual camera to follow the MC though, I tried to test the game and there are 165 errors, which are all variations of the same thing:

“Library\PackageCache\com.unity.quicksearch@3.0.0-preview.2\Editor\Indexing\SearchIndexEntryImporter.cs(126,45): error CS0246: The type or namespace name ‘AllowCaching’ could not be found (are you missing a using directive or an assembly reference?)”

I tried searching for related errors but didn’t find any cases that mirrored mine, only individual examples of error CS0246 and how to correct them by renaming items, which I’m not confident in doing for 165 objects.

I don’t know much about Unity or programming, but I understand this to mean that the naming convention of at least 165 objects Unity uses has either changed or been lost? I guess from the Cinemachine update?

I don’t know how to easily fix all 165 instances. I tried removing the Cinemachine update I did but the errors remained and far more warnings were added to the console.

I have thought about uninstalling Unity altogether and reopening my project, but will that cause further problems? The work I did after updating Cinemachine I already saved, so would that be a problem? Or simply deleting the virtual camera I created sufficient to revert it?

I’m fairly confident that the Cinemachine update is the cause of all the problems since the play feature worked prior to starting the camera tutorial, but maybe I am even wrong in this since this is all new to me.

Any help would be most appreciated!

11

It’s not obvious that the errors are from Cinemachine. The one you quoted is not.

It sounds as though your project got corrupted somehow, possibly because of import problems. You may have installed some mutually incompatible packages.

The first thing to try is Reimport All. If that fails, then we can look at the package manager to figure out which packages you don’t need.

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12

Hi there :slight_smile:
Do you guys know where i can find a practical demonstration of the new confiner2D in a perspective camera setup ?
I find it reaaaaally hard to create the confiner polygon so it fits the proper framing.

I actually think that in perspective, “drawing” the camera confiner itself doesn’t really make sense, what users would ultimately need is to draw the “FOV CONFINER”, does that make any sense and do you think it is doable ? :smile:

13

If your game is taking place on a plane, draw the confiner on that plane. If the camera’s local Z axis is normal to that plane, then the camera’s view will be confined correctly to the drawn shape. If the camera is looking obliquely at that plane, then results will degrade but can still be usable.

What are you finding to be difficult about drawing the shape?

14

Oh ! I just realized that the issue was about the Max Window Size parameter, setting this to zero actually confines the camera like you said. I do get pretty jiggery behaviour in “corners” though… :confused:

15

Can you show an example of this? We recommend setting the Damping parameter to non-zero (0.5 is nice) so that you don’t get snapping in corners.

16

Plot twist, the damping does get rid off the snapping but actually setting max window size to zero improved the Confiner but camera fov is still a bit off.

17

Can you clarify? It’s not clear from your picture. How is it off?

18

If I understand correctly, from the scene view the confiner should not allow the camera to show passed the yellow line on the right. In game view the player sees “too much”. If that makes sense ^^

Image Update :

I’m not expecting to see the red part in game view. Am I wrong ?

19

You are not wrong. Can you show me the full inspector for your vcam?

20

Sure, thanks :slight_smile:


I’m gonna investigate a bit on the Follow Target side of things.
I’ll get back to you soon, thank you for your help, as always !