Unity : Cinemachine and Timeline (Part III)

Matteo Lo Piccolo
3 min readJan 25, 2022

Let’s start where we left off and talk about Dampening.
If we look at the Camera in Play mode, we see that with 0 dampening it always focus on Cube.

IMPORTANT NOTE : from here we see every option in the menu Aim (and then in the menu Body) to understand what are and how use them, but the BEST THING, AS ALWAYS, IS USE THEM IN YOUR PROJECT AND TEST THEM.

Ok, back to Unity.
Now, if we try to apply some dampening

The Camera is on the Cube, but it has a more “smooth” movement around it.
A good “combo” is to use Lookahead Time + Dampening to create a fluid motion.

Screen X to nd Screen Y are needed to adjust the point value of X and Y from the point we see the object

We see that the viewpoint at 0.5 X and 0.5 Y is perfectly centered, if we change them the Camera moves sideways or up / down.

Dead Zone Width and Dead Zone Height are really interesting features.
If we try to set some little values on X and Y, we see that it create a “blue zone” with a white zone inside

The interesting part is this.
If we press Play and see what happen,

We see that when the Cube it a certain point inside the white box, it force the Camera to move.
This can be used in conjunction with Horizontal or vertical damping

This results in a slight movement of the Camera that is it not forced to move.

The Soft Zone Width and the Soft Zone Height are used to reduce the border of the blue zone

If we reduce the borders, if the Cube hit them, again force the Camera to move

The Bias X and Bias Y simply adjust the Soft Zone

This article is short, but is important to understand what’s happen with this Camera when we touch and use the various option, like Damping, Dead zone, etc.
In the next articles we see what happen if we have more than one Camera in the project and how can we use them.

--

--

Matteo Lo Piccolo

Always in love with programming, even if late (I'm already 39 years old) I decided to follow my dream! We will see how far my passion will take me!