Unity Cinemachine: Over-The-Shoulder Aiming

A few articles ago, I talked about the state-driven camera and how I implemented the camera in my Unity project. Quick re-cap state-driven cameras work by assigning virtual cameras as children to the state-driven camera. Then you assign each animated state its camera, which will go live whenever the state is active. Today’s article will dive deeper into a specific animated state (aiming) and how I adjusted the camera to fit that state.

I have an animated state and a script that will activate the transition (bool) whenever the player holds a right click on the mouse.

using System.Collections;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using UnityEngine;

public class Aiming : MonoBehaviour
{
    private Animator _animator;
    private bool _hasAnimatior;
    void Start()
    {
        _hasAnimatior = TryGetComponent(out _animator);
    }

    // Update is called once per frame
    void Update()
    {
        if (Input.GetMouseButton(1))
        {
            if (_hasAnimatior)
            {
                _animator.SetBool("Shooting", true);
            }
        }
        else _animator.SetBool("Shooting", false);
    }
}

Now for the state-driven camera, I have a virtual camera assigned to the animated state. This is a 3rd Person camera, with a different FOV and slightly closer to the player. Whenever aiming from any other state, it will smoothly transition to the over-the-shoulder view.

These are the different states and virtual cameras that the state-driven camera is in charge of. So whenever I press the right mouse button I now have the over-the-shoulder view.