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Cinemachine Base Rig Now Available for Free; Creator Adam Myhill Joins Unity

January 23, 2017 in Technology | 3 min. read
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Unity is excited to announce a powerful new addition to Unity’s creation tools: Cinemachine Base Rig.

Cinemachine is a popular virtual camera system which enables users to give the camera simple directions, without programming, and the system will dynamically track and compose richly complex shots, no matter what the subject does. It's like your own army of AI camera operators!

The system’s configurable for whatever you can dream up, from 3rd person action adventure to replays, game intros and procedural sequences. Cinemachine Base Rig is now available FREE on the Asset Store.    

Cinemachine was created by Adam Myhill, who has nearly 20 years of experience creating camera systems in numerous game engines and with some of the biggest studios in the business. His work speaks for itself, but it was clear we all have a lot to gain from his expertise. And so, we couldn’t be happier to welcome Adam to Unity as our Head of Cinematics, where he’s at work integrating features of Cinemachine Base Rig directly into the engine and informing a lot of our future plans to improve the cinematic creation experience.

Please join us in welcoming Adam and read on for more on how you can make the most out of Cinemachine Base Rig.

Cinemachine is a powerful system and includes a number of components which you can combine to create the exact camera behavior for any scenario; in-game, cutscenes, or anywhere in between. Cinemachine Base Rig includes:

  • Procedural composition
  • Camera body rigs with damping
  • Priority based shots
  • State-machine environment
  • Procedural multi-channel noise
  • Tune while playing

The goal and power of Cinemachine is to empower developers, designers, camera artists and cutscene creators with smart camera tools so they can spend their time exploring and creating instead of  wrestling with camera code. It unleashes artists and provides solutions to the impossible - you can track and compose objects with variable performances.  You can create a bunch of cutscenes and then change animations around and the cameras will adapt and figure out how to best shoot those scenes automatically. A very large amount of time and effort has gone into getting the cameras to behave and ‘feel’ right, with convincing weight and smooth transitions.

It’s easy to setup large complex camera behaviors without writing a single line of code and to tune them all while the game is running.

What’s Next

Cinematography is a lifelong passion for Adam, from calibrating huge photographic enlargers with tiny screwdrivers as a child before starting his own business doing time-lapse aerial photography at the age of 17. He’s designed procedural camera systems for games and has worked as a Director of Photography in feature film, documentaries and music videos. It was via work with Blackbird Interactive that Adam discovered a new passion: developing in Unity.

When we asked Adam why he wanted to join Unity, he told us “Working closely with Unity over the last year made me realize that I wanted to be a part of it. The depth of talent is amazing. It's a place where you can dream up a crazy idea and make it happen. For a guy who designs technology, there’s nothing better than having an environment to incubate ideas and collaborate with others to make them real. Cameras, lighting, rendering, making beautiful images and telling stories, what's cooler than that?”

January 23, 2017 in Technology | 3 min. read

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