Cinemachine Brain and Custom Blends!

Objective: Create custom blends for virtual cameras!

We’ve spent so much time talking about Cinemachine Events, but not about the Cinemachine brain. With events and Cinemachine custom blending you can create custom blends to go from one camera to another. You can also do an activation event. This is like when we previously created an active listener.

We are going to focus on the Cinemachine Cut event and how we are going to make it different. Currently the default blend is always ease in out at 2 seconds. Every camera that we switch between will always have the same camera movement. We are going to switch this and make it different.

Let’s say we want to cut from camera 2 to camera 3 but every other camera move will always be the same, we have to create a custom blend. To start we need a few cameras. I’ll make four cameras each around the player.

If you hit play you will be on camera 1. If you disable camera 1 you will go to camera 2.

If you disable camera 2 you will go to three and so on. All have the same animations, and if we enable the camera back up in the same patter the camera would travel back with the same motions.

Let’s say we want the cuts from camera 2 to 3 to be instantaneous. We don’t want there to be a transition. Let’s say we are going from inside the cockpit to the edge of your wing. To do this we need to create a custom cut by creating a custom blend.

To do this, in the inspector just below the ease setting you click Create Asset. Let’s call it “Main Camera Blends”

We can define a main custom blend. Like I said earlier, if we go from camera 2 to camera 3 we don’t want to ease in, we want to cut. Same goes for when we go from camera 3 to camera 2, we don’t want to ease in we want to cut.

We can make the ease in from camera 3 to 4 take 5 seconds instead of 2.

We have created a custom blend. If you press the play button on the editor and turn off camera 1 you go to camera 2. If you turn off camera 2 you will cut to camera 3. Turn off camera 3 and you will blend to camera 4 taking 5 seconds. Turning back on camera 3 will blend normally to camera 3 since we don’t have the 5 seconds blend going backwards.

This is how you can create custom blend animations between different cameras in your scene! Don’t be afraid to experiment with your own blends and I’ll see you in the next tutorial!