Using Cinemachine to switch with simple gameplay changes

Unity Engine
1

Hi

Forgive the complete beginner question but I am new to Cinemachine.

I’m making a simple racing game and have used Cinemachine to create a lovely smooth follow camera.

I’d like to expand what I’ve got to have a few more camera behaviours in order to give the player feedback. For example:

  • When the player boosts, the camera would quickly pull back to give the sense of rapidly increased speed and then return to normal more slowly to give the sense the player momentaily outpaced the camera.
  • Similarly, if the player brakes the camera would pull a little closer to the player and transition out again when the start to accelerate
  • If the player drifts around a corner perhaps the camera would have some motion blur added or other post-processing effects.

My issue is that all the tutorials I have found for Cinemachine are about changing between vitual cameras based on animations and timeline activities and I’m not familiar with either. My simple little game currently doesn’t make use of them.

I would like to make camera changes based simply on what is happening in the game.

For example, I have a simple bool for “drifting” that changes the physics of the player object handling. Can I tell Cinemachine to look for the value of that variable and change behaviour accordingly?

Could anyone help suggest anything to help me get started?

Can this stuff be done in the editor or does it need a custom script?

Thanks in advance
Jamie

2

For anyone else looking for how to do this. In absence of any formal tutorials the best I can suggest is that you start with the sample scenes that are available to download alongside Cinemachine. Import Cinemachine into your project and this will add a Cinemachine drop down under the main menu. At the bottom of that menu you’ll find “Import Example Asset Package” which includes half a dozen scenes showing different implementations of the system and one is pure C#.