Help chosing the right camera setup.

I've been experimenting with the Cinemachine cameras for a little while, but I'm a relative newbie when it comes to camera systems. I'm trying to setup a scene where the camera tracks a the player and an NPC who are walking together. I want the camera to be to one side of the NPC, determined by the path the NPC is following. So kinda like a side scrolling view, but the NPC is changing direction in world space every so often, and I want the camera to rotate to have them always moving to the right of the screen.

I've got a main gameplay virtual cam, that's set to look at a target group of the NPC and Player, and to follow the NPC, all of this works fine. I have had the Body set to Transposer, and initially to Simple Follow With World Up, which is fine for tracking them around the world, but doesn't allow the side scrolling angle. I experimented with changing it to World Space, and this works brilliantly as long as the NPC is moving in a fixed direction, but when they start moving in a different direction I can't figure out how to tell it to rotate.

I'm wondering if there is a different set of settings I should be using, or if I should be setting up a bunch of different Virtual cams that I switch between when the NPC reaches different waypoints, or even if I should be using a dolly cam and create a track that is parallel to the NPC path.

Any advice or ideas?

 

Thanks for the direction (and quick feedback!), will experiment, I have currently built a dolly track that tracks the characters through the level. But if I want branching paths, it would be better to have the camera more independently attached to them. And thanks for making such an awesome component, I keep getting amazed by what it can do all the time.

 

This is the result of the dolly track approach, the level has a direction that is independent of the rotation of the characters, I tried the Transposer's bind mode to "LockToTargetWithWorldUp", but since my characters keep changing direction, the camera keeps flicking around. The dolly track approach seems to work fine, except I can't dynamically change where the target of the characters is. i.e. if they come to a fork in the road, after making a decision, switch the target to down one of the paths, and have the camera re-position itself to be moving between the last check point and the one down the new road. More I think about it, I guess I'll need to write custom code, or just make a dolly track for each possible path.