When will Reactor be available?

Unity Engine
1

Hi,

Loving the flexibility and beauty of cinemachine so far. Big thanks to the devs. I would like to know when Reactor will be released.

Thanks.

2

Reactor was designed at a relatively early point in the evolution of Cinemachine. Since then, Cinemachine has added enough native features to effectively replace what Reactor was doing, so we’ve shelved Reactor indefinitely.

What specific functionality are you looking for?

3

Thank you for responding.

I am not looking for any particular functionality, just for examples on how to best rig the camera system to behave like AAA racing game titles. In particular I would like to know how to best place the camera(s), their orientation and blends. Do you have any pointers?

Thank you in advance.

4

Hi @enlite

Reactor had some really good ideas and workflows but as Gregory said, it’s so old and we’ve really moved on in so many ways. You can do most of what Reactor could do now much more simply.

I’ll give you an overview of some ways to approach a 3rd person car camera.

Get the latest CM from the Package Manager - if you’re on 2017.x

Import the example packages
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Load up the FollowCam scene

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In there you can see a Simple Follow camera setup. Mess around with the Aim and Body controls to get different feels. It has a simple but powerful/flexible follow camera setup.

That’s a start. Next steps are to change cameras based on what’s happening with the vehicle - that’s what Reactor did - allowing different game variables to drive camera properties. One way to do this now is with the Mixing camera:
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This lets you create a number of cameras and mix between them based on whatever you’d like.

One setup could be to have a ‘Slow’ camera, which is close to the car and has a particular composition and then make a ‘Fast’ camera which is higher, further back and say with a little bit of noise or more aggressive damping.

You can dynamically blend between those two cameras based on the vehicle speed, so as you go faster it blends smoothly from the Slow to the Fast camera, with the Child Camera Weights

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Add a 3rd camera ‘Turbo’ which gets closer but widens the FOV is outside of the mixing camera. Simply turn that camera on and off whenever the person presses the Turbo button in your game will cause the Turbo camera to blend in and out.

Do this by setting up a Custom Blend rig on the Main Camera’s 'Brain, shown here:

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You can setup how any two cameras can blend, note the wildcards here so that it will blend into Turbo camera over 1 second and then blend back out of Turbo camera for 2 seconds, every time you press the turbo button (which turns that camera on and off)

You can continue this thinking to make as many camera behaviors to listen to game events as you want.

I did the cameras on the game Need for Speed and we had 49 ! different channels from car to camera. Crazy!

Always remember rule #1 for Cinemachine:

Never try to make one virtual camera do everything. Instead make lots of different vcams and blend to them based on events in your game

Let us know how it goes!

1 Like
5

Hi Adam,

Thank you so much for filling my knowledge gap and reaffirming that I was not overthinking the problem by using multiple cameras and blend techniques. I will go back and add more of what you have prescribed. Knowing that this is how the “pros” do it will keep me sane :slight_smile: . I will keep you posted on my endeavours.

Thanks again.
Ken.