Today I continued the adventure of working on The Great Fleece, the Stealth & Cinematography game. I placed the actors (called blocking) and through the course of completing the tutorials, reviewed the director notes on the shots we’re supposed to get. I set up two CineMachine virtual cameras with each positioned to capture the director’s desired angles.
I then created the new animations in the timeline: an Over-The-Shoulder shot and what’s called a mid shot, which is a shot from the waist up. I manipulated the two shots in the timeline window so that they transitioned from the first to the second shot rather seamlessly and I was really impressed with Unity’s ability to “meld” the scenes together with simply adjusting a slider. Just by overlapping the scenes, Unity was able to smoothly pan from the OTS shot camera position to the Mid shot position. Mind-blowing!
However, instead of just having a static camera rolling and capturing the character’s animation, you’re able to move the cameras and pan around the scene in whatever way you see fit.
I captured the first desired animation by panning the OTS camera up and over the shoulder of the main character. The second shot (so far) is just still the video of the main character from another angle but from a static point. And then here’s where I encountered the problems.
This new panning animation (like all animations) can be manipulated in the Animation window of the editor and is stored in multiple keyframes for various positions at various times. The fatal mistake I made was to accidentally delete my very first keyframe and then UNDO/REDO so many times and start on different paths that I am so far unable to restore this very first starting keyframe.
I’m going to be conducting some research on keyframes to see if I can make this initial keyframe on my own and if this doesn’t work, I’ll be starting this section over. Stay tuned for the final verdict.
