Prevent the Camera View Being Blocked by Obstacles - Unity Game Development Tutorial

-

In this Unity game development tutorial we're going to look at how we can configure our camera, so that it automatically adjusts the view when the line of sight to our character is blocked.

You can either watch the video version below or continue reading for written instructions.

OK, we'll start with this scene that has a character and some obstacles. 

Start scene with a character that moves around and interacts with obstacles

We've currently got a Cinemachine virtual camera that follows the character around, but at the moment, if we move behind the wall, our view is blocked.

The view blocked by the wall

We're now going to use another component of Cinemachine to prevent the view from being blocked. We'll click on the Extensions dropdown and select Cinemachine Collider.

Adding Cinemachine Collider

This adds a component that will check if the view to the target is blocked and will automatically try to resolve it.

There are a few strategies for how it tries to do this. 

Collision resolution strategies

The default strategy is 'Preserve Camera Height', which will attempt to change the view while staying at the original height.

Alternative options are 'Pull Camera Forward', which moves the camera forwards along the Z axis, and 'Preserve Camera Distance', which changes the view while trying to maintain the original distance from the target.

We'll leave the default settings and press play to try it out. Now when we move behind the wall, the camera rotates to keep the character in view.

The camera rotating to keep the character in view

And if we move away from the wall, the camera returns to its original position.

Than camera returning to the original position

At the moment, the camera snaps instantly between the different views. We can make this look a lot smoother by adding some damping to the movement.

Let's stop the game and set the Damping value to 2. This setting determines how quickly the camera will return to its normal position. We'll also set the 'Damping when Occluded' value to 2. This setting determines how quickly the camera will move when trying to resolve an occlusion.

Setting the damping values

Let's press play to try this out. Now when we move behind the wall, the camera moves smoothly to keep the character in view.

The camera moving smoothly to keep the character in view

And when we move away from the wall, the camera smoothly returns to the original position.

The camera moving smoothly back to the original position

That covers everything for this tutorial. We hope that you found it useful. Please leave any questions or feedback in the comments below, and don't forget to subscribe to get notified when we publish our next post.

Thanks.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Rotating a Character in the Direction of Movement - Unity Game Development Tutorial

-
Image
In this Unity game development tutorial we're going to look at how we can rotate an object so that it faces the direction it’s moving in. You can either watch the video version below or continue reading for written instructions. Right, let's get started by creating a new 3D project in Unity Hub. We'll add a Plane to represent our floor by clicking the plus button on the Hierarchy and selecting 3D Object->Plane. We'll set the scale of the Plane to ten on the X axis and ten on the Z axis. Next, we'll create a material to change the colour of the floor. To do this, we'll click the plus button on the Project panel and select Material. We'll name this material 'Floor'. We'll then click on the box next to Albedo in the Inspector panel, and choose a green colour.  We can now drag the material on to the Plane to assign it. We now need a character to move around our scene. For this we'll head over to the Asset Store by selecting Window->A
Read more

Creating Terrain from Heightmaps - Unity Game Development Tutorial

-
Image
In this Unity game development tutorial we're going to look at how we can create realistic looking terrain from real world height data. You can either watch the video version below or continue reading for written instructions. You can hand sculpt terrain using the tools in Unity, but in this tutorial we're going to look at an alternative - using images known as heightmaps. A heightmap is a grayscale image that contains height information. The darker pixels represent areas of low height and the lighter pixels represent higher areas. Below is an example of a heightmap. There are various sources online that you can get free heightmaps, but we're going to look at this one that allows you to create heightmaps of the real world - https://cs.heightmap.skydark.pl/ This resource was created for generating terrain for the game Cities Skylines but it will work just as well in Unity. Basically, it allows us to select any 18km square area on the map and then create a hei
Read more

Simple Movement using Gamepad and Keyboard - Unity Game Development Tutorial

-
Image
In this Unity game development tutorial we'll look at how we can process player input from a gamepad or the keyboard and use that to move an object within the game. 1. To get started let's create a new 3D project in Unity Hub. 2. Add a Plane to the scene to represent our floor by clicking the plus button on the Hierarchy panel and selecting 3D Object->Plane. 3. We'll use a capsule to represent our player. Add this to the scene by clicking the plus button on the Hierarchy panel and selecting 3D Object->Capsule. 4. Set the position of the capsule to (0, 1, 0) in the Inspector panel to position it on top of the plane. 5. In order to process the player input and use it to make the capsule move we need to create a C# script to contain our logic. To do this click on the 'Add Component' button in the Inspector panel, search for script and click 'New Script'. Call the new script PlayerMovement. This will create a script component attached to the capsule. 6. Do
Read more