New 5 part Cinemachine 3.1 Youtube tutorial series available

Technical Articles
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Hey everyone. We just launched a new YouTube tutorial series on Cinemachine. It’s been a while since we did the original series, and we thought that Cinemachine 3.1 was a great opportunity to help you get up to speed. Here is a quick overview of the tutorials.

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An introduction to Cinemachnine

In the first video we look at the basics of Cinemachine 3.1 for those getting started or who would like a refresher. We explore the different types of Cinemachine Cameras including: Follow Camera, Third Person Aim extension, FreeLook Camera, Spline Dolly, Sequencer Camera, and more.

Cinemachine and Timeline

In the second video we look into how you can combine Cinemachine with Timeline to create complex animated sequences directly in Unity. We look at key concepts like setting up shots and animations, activating and deactivating sequences, camera events, depth of field blurs, and more.

Cinemachine 2D Cameras

The third video is dedicated to 2D games using Cinemachine cameras, and we look at confiners to keep the camera within certain gameplay boundaries, 2D camera zoom camera shake feature, and effects triggered using events.

Cinemachine Player Controller Cameras

Here we explore the different types of Cinemachine cameras you can use to track your playable characters. It covers switching between camera types, adding object avoidance to ensure the camera does not clip through walls, and tips for how to use the Deoccluder extension, Clear Shot component, and more.

Cinemachine tips and tricks

We wrap up the series with a few tips on working efficiently with Cinemachine 3.1, inspired by some of the questions we have often seen here on Discussions. We show you how to fix any jitters in object movement, make a FreeLook Camera rotate in real-time around a character in slow motion, use the FreeLook Modifier component, and work with the Cinemachine Target Group component to track multiple characters.

We hope the videos will be helpful! Either as a refresher if you are already an experienced Cinemachine user, or if you are just getting started. If you have any general questions or feedback about Cinemachine don’t hesitate to post them in Unity Discussions where @Gregoryl and team will try their best to help.

Also make sure to check out our documentation here: Cinemachine package | Cinemachine | 3.1.5

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As a long-time cinemachine (since 2.x) user, absolutely loved these. Fantastic flow through, lots of good specific example segments in each video, and great use of Unity assets to make the videos feel quality but also be reproducible.

Excellent walkthrough of how all the components were intended to be structured in the new Cinemachine 3 3D cameras, which fixes that “simplified but still a bit complex with lots of choices and all the youtube tutes I google are Cinemachine2” feeling.

Minor Nit: It would be great to use Awaitable and Awaitable.WaitForSeconds not Task.Delay in the 2D coding script. It does the same thing but actually works on web, whereas Task.Delay will just insta-hang.

Overall 10/10 great job.

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I would love to see more on extending cinemachine. I do a lot with cinemachine cams along with a lot of custom scripts and tracks for it. But more guides would be nice.

Like this video showed me you can extend the dolly track functionality which helped me a ton. My previous method was a lot more janky just to get a “dolly track over x seconds” function.

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Yep, that’s a banger of a video. One of the best.

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I don’t get why [SaveDuringPlay] attribute etc isn’t just part of Unity and only available via cinemachine.

Other than that I only have praise for cinemachine it’s one for few good things for Unity in last few years since it came out that just works and is very powerful and isn’t anything better to distract from it. Absolute no brainer to use really and I still wonder why I come across assets that never bother adding it especially when they involve switching camera systems or are a character controller. And scripting it further isn’t complicated either.. it’s surprisingly easy to extend and build around it. I wish I could say the same about other areas of Unity.

Like SRP’s a mess with a trail of pink shaders from simpler birp times or switching pipelines, And Multiplayer where as dozen alternatives exist and continue to do so leaving behind assets that had built in networking around what was good at the time but probably isn’t anymore etc.. it’s annoying.

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Hi, I just switched from Cinemachine 2.3 to Cinemachine 3.x and I’m having a really annoying problem.
SplineContainer is really hard to edit compared to Cinemachine Path, especially in 2d environment I can’t edit Bezier curve.
Is anyone else having the same problem?

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@DungDajHjep If you’re making a spline for a camera path, you’re best not editing the bezier directly, or you will introduce non-smoothness at the knots. Just add/delete knots and move them around, and let CinemachinePathSmoother handle the rest.

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Spline editing is a user demand, should I make a video of how easy camera path editing is in version 2.3 compared to version 3.x to show you clearly?

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Just explaining the requirement would be enough, probably. I have no idea what the context is.

If necessary, you can still use the legacy Cinemachine path components with CM3. They’re still there, just marked obsolete. You can also make your own wrappers for Splines.

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To be clear, I’m complaining about the editing mode of SplineContainer, which was extremely easy in Cinemachine 2.3’s CameraPath before. Why such a step backward?
I expected editing Splines in SplineContainer to be as easy as working with CameraPath.
Is this too difficult to achieve?

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Since you don’t specify what your requirements are beyond suggesting that you want it to be “easy”, there is not much I can offer you.

If you have some specific suggestions to make about spline editing, perhaps you can reach out to the Splines team by making an appropriately tagged post.

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Thanks, I’ve created a complaint post here.
Although you’ve made it modular, it still significantly impacts the usability of the Cinemachine camera package.

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Library\PackageCache\com.unity.cinemachine@5342685532bb\Runtime\PostProcessing\CinemachineVolumeSettings.cs(214,64): error CS1061: ‘DepthOfField’ does not contain a definition for ‘focalLength’ and no accessible extension method ‘focalLength’ accepting a first argument of type ‘DepthOfField’ could be found (are you missing a using directive or an assembly reference?)
how can i fix it

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it said this is my error

#if CINEMACHINE_URP
if (profile.TryGet(out DepthOfField srcDof))
{
dof.aperture.value = srcDof.aperture.value;
dof.focalLength.value = srcDof.focalLength.value;
}

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It’s a bug in CM 3.1.5, which does not support URP and HDRP being installed simultaneously in the same project. We will fix that for the next release. In the meantime, you can downgrade Cinemachine to 3.1.4.

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oh yes its the “Renderer” oh. i just delete my project felt so bad about it i try it to in HDRP its error same as URP thnx