Unique Types of Body Settings in Virtual Cameras
Cinemachine’s Body comprises algorithms to tailor how virtual cameras move in your scene. We’ll be taking a brief look at these behavior modifiers today.
Objective: Learn about the individual properties of Cinemachin’s Body — how they modify the camera’s behavior and how they work.
Note: I will be using terms and concepts from this article, in case you need to follow along.
Body Algorithms
Body Algorithms modify the way the virtual camera follows, aims, or interacts with a given object. The algorithms tend to look extremely similar in nature, but their functions differ, as well as the individual components that allow for deeper customization. Go over each individual component would make a rather convoluted article, but you can familiarize yourself with them here.
Transposer
Let’s start by taking a look at Transposer. If you’ve followed along with my Cinemachine articles, you will recognize the Dampening modifiers that become available with this property. These work the same as they do in the Aim Features.
The Transposer will always move the camera in a fixed position in perspective to the assigned Follow target.
Here you can see Transposer in action using the Lock target with World Up as a Binding Mode and a bit of Dampening.
Transposer with Modifications
Each behavioral algorithm has its own set of modes and options that allows us to customize it even more.
We already know what dampening does by learning from Aiming Features, so we’ll focus on Binding Mode which is a property available to every Trasponser algorithm variant.
Binding Mode
Binding Mode refers to the coordinate space to be applied while analyzing the damping and the offset from the target. Let’s look at these individual modes to get a better perspective on what this means.
Binding mode Examples:
- Lock To Target On Assign When the Virtual Camera is turned on or when the target is assigned, this will use the local frame for the Follow target. The offset will remain constant in perspective to the world's space.
Note: If the targeted object rotates, the camera won’t emulate the rotation. In order to achieve this, we would also need to assign a Look At target, but that’ll be on the next article when we’re putting it all together.
- Lock To Target With World Up The virtual camera uses the local frame of the Follow target with tilt and roll set to 0, except for yaw, this binding mode ignores all target rotations.
Note: Yaw rotation refers to how responsive the camera is when tracking rotation angles on Y.
Here you can see the Lock to Target With World Up in action with an additional modification to the Offset.
The Offset refers to the distance that must be kept between the Virtual Camera and the Follow target.
Note: You can take a look at all the diffrent Binding Modes here:
Framing Transposer:
The camera moves toward the Follow target in fixed screen space. Once again, Offsets, damping, and composition rules are further options that can help you modify this behavior.
While using Framing Transposer, only the camera’s position in space is altered by the framing transposer, no aiming occurs and therefore no rotation.
When you select Framing Transposer, you will see this grid frame appear in your game view as an indicator.
Note: The “Look At” slot must be empty in order to use this.
The Framing Transposer was designed with 2D and orthographic cameras in mind, but that’s not to say that 3D cameras can’t benefit from it. It also functions effectively in 3D settings and with perspective cameras.
You can see a full list of each of its components here.
Orbital Transposer
Rather than a fixed screen space, the Orbital Transposer uses a variable movement in perspective to the Virtual Camera’s Follow target. Again, the difference between algorithms isn’t immediately noticeable, especially without more in-depth customization, but what makes this camera unique it’s the fact that it has the option to register player input. By registering player input, the play can control the camera dynamically.
Another unique point is that this Transposer is the only one to feature Heading, a way to track the direction in which the target is moving or facing. The camera is always behind the target by default, but by using the Heading Bias, you can adjust this.
You read more about the individual options of the Orbital Transposer here.
Hard Lock to Target
This algorithm uses the same position as the Follow target as a mounting point. This type of camera is specifically good for objects that have a more static camera view.
Here you can see that the camera is literally in the target/object.
Even if I separate it and press play again, the camera will always automatically mount itself to the target again.
The remaining Body Properties are Tracked Dolly and 3rd Person, I will be discussing them in the next article where they will be combined with Orbital Transposer.
I hope you have found this information valuable! Follow me for more Unity Development articles! :) I am a video game narrative designer on a journey to learn more about Unity Development and Software Engineering.
