Cinemachine Brain — What is it?

Dennisse Pagán Dávila
3 min readJan 24, 2023

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Cinemachine Brain is a Unity Camera component that monitors all active Virtual Cameras in your scene. As such, Cinemachine Brain is in charge of assigning the next virtual camera that controls the Unity Camera and manages transitions(Blends and Cuts) from the current Virtual Camera to the next.

Let’s take a look at this step-by-step.

Objective: Learn how to create custom transitions with Cinemachine Brain, and understand how it works.

Table of Contents

· Adding the Component and Setting Up your Scene
· Adding Custom Blends
· The Result

You can check out all of my Cinemachine articles here.

Adding the Component and Setting Up your Scene

This will be similar to other blend and state cameras I’ve discussed before, except this time we’ll be directly manipulating the Cinemachine Brain Component.

  1. Let’s start by adding a Virtual Camera and then adding the Cinemachine Brain.

Adding Vcam:

Adding the component:

2. Now, we need to create more cameras so that we can create blends between them. You may position your cameras however you like, just make sure they each have different views.

These are my different views:

Note: Do NOT duplicate the cameras. This will cause all of them to have the same view.

Adding Custom Blends

Going back to the first camera, the one with the Cinemachine Brain Component, we are going to focus on two main things for this example.

  • The Default Blend is the transition behavior every single camera will have.
  • We can set a different blend/transition per camera by using Custom Blends. We just need to add our cameras to the Custom Blends list.
  1. Click on “Create Asset”, this will give us an asset for our custom blends.

2. With the Custom Blends Asset, you can decide the following:

  • Which camera you are to moving from
  • Which camera you are moving to
  • In what style are you making that movement and the amount of time(in seconds) it takes to get from one cam to the other.

So here, we are assigning them:

The Cut style doesn’t have seconds because it’s an instant switch between cameras.

The Result:

With all the cameras added to my Custom Blends Asset, you can see how they behave as I switch between them. (

Note: This is a bit sped up so that the gif wouldn’t exceed the upload size.

I hope you have found this information valuable! Follow me for more Unity Development articles! :) I am a passionate Unity Developer and Writer on a journey to join the video game industry. Check out my LinkedIn and Twitter!

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Dennisse Pagán Dávila
Dennisse Pagán Dávila

Written by Dennisse Pagán Dávila

Software Engineer that specialize in Game Development. Currently looking for new opportunities. Portfolio: dennissepagan.com

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