Cinemachine/Timeline in 5.6.0f1 with SteamVR + Spectator camera?

Hey Cinemateam. I'm working on a SteamVR project which relies heavily on "spectator" cameras for the audience to see what's happening in VR. I'd love for those cameras to be controlled via Cinemachine/Timeline, but it seems that the 5.6 beta has some conflicts with SteamVR (tried 5.6.0b1, 5.6.0b6). The HMD display works fine, and can mirror to the desktop display, but as soon as I try to enable the spectator camera with "Target Eye: None (Main Display)" the HMD goes blank.

It seems to be related to this bug [forum thread], which is fixed in 5.6.0f1 (Just tested a quick scene to confirm). However, Timeline doesn't appear to be implemented in 5.6.0.f1.

Is there a way to bring Timeline + Cinemachine into 5.6.0f1? Or to roll that fix into 5.6.0b1?

 

Thanks for the fast reply! So excited for Timeline + Cinemachine to hit release Unity. Coming into VR dev from a filmmaking/post production background it makes so much sense.

 

Any update on this? Is it possible now in 2017.2 beta and the preview build of Cinemachine?

Related, can Cinemachine work with multiple VR cameras? Any documentation on doing this?

 

Hi @dpentecost Timeline and CM work very well and are stable in 2017.1 Grab Cinemachine off the Asset Store and you're good to go.

Regarding VR and Cinemachine, CM is really just a camera animation system. In VR the camera animation system is your head and neck. Inserting CM on the actual VR camera is something that would have to be handled extremely gently and with a lot of thought, otherwise.... sicko.

We're using CM in VR to do cool things like generating movie-like content of a VR experiences in real-time for people without VR hardware to watch. CM does shot evaluation and can cut away from bad shots to other ones, in real-time, so you can make cutscenes which handle variable scenarios. There's a video of that here.

 

Adam - Thanks for the quick and thoughtful response. I have taken a look at Cinemachine and it is an amazing tool. I'm doing a personal bootcamp in new Unity features, VR and AR this summer and I will be working more with it.

I agree that it "would have to be handled extremely gently". It occurs to me that what I am thinking of might be better handled in Timeline with multiple cameras. But I am seeing some new VR narratives that are exploring how camera cutting in VR would work. In live action VR director Doug Liman (Edge of Tomorrow with Tom Cruise) is pushing this with his "Invisible" miniseries. In Unity you folks are pioneering an approach to interactive cutscenes and camera cutting in games that we haven't seen before. There's got to be a way to use this in VR!

Disclaimer: I am a survivor of the TV industry, where I worked as an editor. I now run a small planetarium in the East Village, NYC, using Unity in immersive hemispheric projection. I'm finding most of my framing and editing tricks have gone out the window. And I do need a solution for the rest of the audience when one or two people are in VR. So it's great fun to dabble in this new approach you folks have brought to this. Onward!