Getting that Hand-Held Look on Cameras + Two Cinematic Challenges

Unless your camera person is a machine attached to a wall, you just might want to add some subtle shake to your camera to get a more real feel. Having some mild shake is a great way to add a bit of that human feel to your cinematic shots.

Cinemachine comes perfectly equipped with a noise option for just such an occasion! Just head to the inspector with your desired virtual camera selected, and navigate down to the Noise function. Change the default none value to Basic Multi Channel Perlin. The error is telling me that I need to choose a Noise Profile.

The Noise Profile dropdown has a collection of ready to go Profiles for your camera shake. I choose the Handheld Normal Mild option.

There is a Pivot Offset option for your shake, as well as Amplitude Gain and Frequency Gain. The Amplitude dictates how hard the camera shakes while the Frequency is how fast. Now get shaking!

Challenge 1: Create a 3rd person follow camera that acts as the main camera, as well as an Orbital camera to act as the secondary camera. Have the Orbital camera take control while the right mouse button is held down.

There are two variables for the cinemachine cams, and the using Cinemachine Namespace is needed up top. I have a high level int value to set the main camera priority to, as well as a lower level default for the Orbital Camera.

When the Player holds down the right mouse button, the Orbital camera gets assigned the highest Priority level, and becomes the main camera. When the right mouse button is released, the Orbital camera resets back to it’s original Priority level (9), which makes the Follow (3rd person cam), the main camera with a preset Priority of 10.

Here I have a 3rd person cinemachine camera, which changes to the Orbital camera with a button press, so the player can look around the game scene.