Composing A Scene in Unity for Cutscenes

Objective: The process of composing shots from director notes

Position the actors in the scene

In this article, I will share my process for composing the shots in a cutscene based on the Director’s notes. Unity’s Cinemachine helps developers create amazing cutscenes to help tell the story and I will show you how easy it is.

Gettings notes on camera shots is a common practice when you are making a game with cutscenes. Here I have a scene with two different shot angles that show’s our main character being captured during a game over cutscene.

Director’s notes on camera angles for two shots

The first thing, I will locate the spot where this event is occurring and “block out” the scene with “actors”.

Position the actors in the scene

For this first shot, I will bring in one virtual camera by navigating to Cinemachine > Create Virtual Camera. Next, I will adjust my Scene view and once I have the Scene view at the right angle, I will select the virtual camera and align its view to the Scene view by pressing the CTRL+SHIFT+F.

Align the virtual camera with the scene view

Now that looks pretty close to the director’s first shot, we can move onto the second shot in the same way. Bring in another virtual camera, get the Scene view similar to the director’s requirement, and align the virtual camera to the scene view.

Composing an over the headshot

With both the virtual camera game objects in the hierarchy, now would be a good time to re-organising the hierarchy by renaming the virtual cameras and grouping them with the other cutscene objects.

Organising the virtual cameras

That is it! In the next article, I will demonstrate how to use the Dolly track to move around or follow a subject.

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