The Epitome Heist: Introduction to Timeline in Unity
Objective: Use Timeline to create a cutscene in Unity
Unity’s Timeline is a feature able to create cinematic content, game-play sequences, audio sequences, and complex particle effects.
In this example we are going to use Unity’s Timeline to create the cutscene above.
First we can open Timeline from the drop down Window > Sequencing > Timeline. Once open you should see a similar window, depending on which version of Unity you are using.
Timeline can be used in conjunction with Unity’s Cinemachine feature to create some cool camera sequences. Therefore for this to work our Main Camera object is required to have a Cinemachine Brain component attached to it. If it does not have one, simply go to your Main Camera select Add Component and add Cinemachine Brain.
Timeline has the ability to control animations, audio, activation objects and more. To get started we will create an empty game object to house all our cutscene elements. Once created we will then select create in the Timeline window to create a Playable Director Component on our empty gameobject.
This will be the start of our Timeline. To get us started I have created a few tracks and will explain what each will do for us in this example.
These tracks were created using the Timeline window and selecting the ‘+’ drop down. Each Binding corresponds to a different track that is controlling a different object.
First let discuss our Cinemachine Track. This track uses Virtual Cameras to change camera angles depending on the amount of time or frames desired. For example we have two Virtual Cameras in our scene and they are placed in two different locations. We can drag these Virtual Cameras to our Cinemachine Track to tell the Playable Director component to look at one camera angle and then change to the next camera angle as displayed in the preview above.
You are able to change the size of the track elements to signify how long you want to be looking in each camera angle.
Next let's discuss our Animation Track. We have four in this cutscene and each have a different role but ultimately perform the same function. Perform an action based on values given. For example we want our game characters animation and we want our camera to pan at the same time. By adding both to the Timeline we can execute them simultaneously.
If we drag our animation for our game characters to the Timeline we can automatically create an Animation Track with little effort. Next if we want to create an animation for our camera pan we need to add a Animation Track manually as discussed previously using the ‘+’ dropdown. The we can drag the Virtual Camera over and create an Animation Track for it. Next we select record and move the camera to the position and rotation we want. This will create a keyframe. Slide the white tab over to the next position in the scene to create our next angle we want the camera to be positioned. Then repeat until we have the positions we want our camera to display for this cutscene.
Lastly, we will demonstrate our the Activation Track. The Activation Track allows you to tell Timeline when you want a gameobject active in the scene. So for example we have our card gameobject be active up until the point that the player grabs it. This simulates how it would happen in real life.
There are more detailed approaches to discover but this guide serves as a introduction to how I created a cutscene in Unity using Timeline.
