Unity’s Cinemachine: Look At and Aim Features

Hello all!

Today, I will go over the virtual camera’s aiming features!

I setup a short animation to demonstrate the aiming feature

How to Enable the Aim Feature

To enable the Aim feature in the inspector, you must assign an object to the Look At option. When enabled, it will give you access to more options.

Explaining the Options Under Aim

There are several options under the Aim menu. These control speed, timing, and positioning of the camera while aiming!

• Tracked Object Offset — This is used to change where the camera will aim on the object. This could be used to aim at the head of your player instead of their center.
• Lookahead Time — When this is set to 0, the camera looks straight at the object while moving. This can be paired with damping to keep ahead of your object.
• Lookahead Smoothing — This is used to reduce the jerking motion of the lookahead time.
• Lookahead Ignore Y — This is only useful for top-down games where you won’t use the Y rotation.
• Damping — When set to 0, the camera will always be aimed on the yellow dot. Damping is used to give a little leeway, so the camera isn’t so jerky. When it is set too high though, you may lose track of the object and won’t know what’s ahead.
• Screen X/Y — These move the position of the camera view on the screen. By using this, you could move the screen to the bottom-right.
• Dead Zone — This will make it where the camera won’t move until it reaches a certain distance from the middle.
• Soft Zone — This is the red area of the camera. When the yellow dot reaches this zone, the camera moves regardless of the other settings to keep up.
• Bias X/Y — Changes where the zones are on the camera.

That is the basics for the virtual camera’s aiming feature!

Next, I’ll go over switching between multiple virtual cameras.

Thank you for your time!