Can Cinemachine be used as gameplay camera?

Everything I see online about Cinemachine seems to be all about cinematic, but I don't see a reason why it can't be used as gameplay camera. Is this one of the expected use case? Is there any reason I should avoid doing this?

 

There are some demo video's of Unity themselves where they talk about in game usage where cut scenes are triggered.
It involves a mouse. Also the track features are used to track a player for example moving true the terrain and switching camera's for best angles.

There is also a new blog about changing Cinemachine stuff from script. https://blogs.unity3d.com/2018/04/05/creative-scripting-for-timeline/
I myself am using Cinemachine in my upcoming 2d game to switch from train cart to train cart and to the lift letting the scene machine camera follow different objects and move between them. I love the more natural movement of the camera keeping the object on screen but not in the exact middle all the time. If you add Cinemachine to your project there are some demo scenes that show game play setups.

 

We hear this question all the time. Yes, CM is an in-game camera system. There's so many features in CM just for games. We are guilty of this perception as many of the demos show just cinematic stuff but there's so much in there for gameplay specifically.

I'm not sure what genre your game is but one way to see a bunch of gameplay specific features is to checkout our demo scenes.

After CM is loaded, install the demo scenes:


It will load a bunch of example scenes which cover all sorts of genres and gameplay cameras:


They're super basic scenes but a fun way to see how to configure CM in a bunch of different ways.

Here's a talk where I go over some more gameplay camera ideas.

If you have questions after that, don't hesitate to hit us up here on the forums.

 

Any tutorials for the gameplay stuff? Especially switching up the camera based on state changes?

 

Hi @ve110cet - two things to get you started:

There's this:

Also, there's the example scenes which have a demo of this in action. Go Cinemachine->Install demo scenes from the top menu bar and checkout the State Driven Camera scene

 

Any tips regarding simple object orbiting camera done by Cinemachine? With traditional script approach, this is simple, however, I was wondering if there is some solutions build in the tool or another type of approaches more fitting for the Cinemachine.

Looking for something like this: https://lmhpoly.com/unity-tutorial-rotate-a-camera-around-the-object/

 

I am looking for a tutorial how to use Cinemachine in a multiplay game following the right player. Any advice how to do that?

 

If it's split screen, what you end up doing is having separate cameras for each player, with separate brains on each camera, and then each brain camera needs to be on a different layer. Then that brain only solves for virtual cameras on the same layer. Simply have a new layer for each player possibly, and assign the follow/look at targets for the virtual cameras to their respective player objects.

 

Is cinemachine heavy on CPU? Would it be worth writing my own script if I only wanted to have a blend between two cameras?