Go around! Creating and using dolly tracks for Cinemachine and Timeline

In this article I will explain how to add and use a dolly track to create a nice moving camera effect in Unity.

Folling director notes we are trying to achive the following.

In order to get the camera to track around our player we need to use a dolly track. A dolly track is just a path you can map out for your cameras with nodes for different points in the path of the track. You can add a camera to this track and animate it so you get the effect of the camera tracking an object and moveing along with it. Pick any movie you’ve watched and theres a chance a dolly track was used at some point.

The first step is to add our dolly track to our scene. Make sure you have Cinemachine installed then on the tool bar select “Cinemachine” > “Create Dolly Track With Camera”. This will create a dolly track and Cinemachine virtual camera in your scene.

Next step is to find your track and use the transform to move it to the correct position in your scene.

You will notice you have 2 node (0 & 1). In Cinemachine virtual camera, under the body settings you will have a float variable called “Path Position”. Changing this value will result in the camera moving along the dolly track with each whole number relating to the node number of the dolly track.

On the actual dolly track itself there are a couple of options:

Resolution: this setting adjusts the amount of path samples per waypoint, essentially it is how the path distances are calculated. A higher number will allow a larger curve and a lower number will provide a straighter track when adjusting

Appearance: this setting is realated to the cosmetic look of the dolly track in the scene view. You can adust the colours and width here.

Looped: this setting will set the track form a continous loop.

Path length: this is a read only setting that shows the entire tracks length.

Waypoints: this setting shows all way point positions for the track. You can manually adjust their positions and curves or add and remove waypoints here.

I’ve added a thrid node so now I can move our midde node to create a nice dolly track around the guards in our scene.

Thats all for now.