Unity Developer — Timeline

At this point in your game developer career, you are most likely starting out with a few arcade protoypes or other projects. With this, you may think that you are not ready or have any need to learn to make a cutscene. Maybe you don’t need one for a giant RPG just yet, but there are many uses that come knowing how to make one. Unity’s Timeline is the answer.

Unity’s Timeline window works similarly to the Animation window. Create an object in the Hierarchy that you want to hold the Playable Director. This is the component that runs a timeline.

Now, in the timeline window you can create many different tracks to how make your own cutscene. With an Animation track, you can bring in any object and record changes to the Inspector. This can be used to move the object’s transform, or enable different components. If you already have a number of animations made for this object, you’ll also be able to play any one of them.

There are also Audio tracks and Activation tracks. As you would expect, the Audio tracks allow you to place any audio clip and play it at any point you wish. The Activations tracks either activate or deactivate the object of your choice.

You can use all the information above to make a very nice cutscene. Let’s say we want to make it feel even more cinematic. Then we have to use Cinemachine. You’ll have to import it from the Package Manager, but there are plenty of good reasons to do so.

With Cinemachine, you can create different ‘Virtual Cameras.’ With these cameras, you can create many different ‘shots’ just as if you were creating a movie. When creating virtual cameras, the Main Camera will be given a ‘Cinemachine Brain’ that helps to organize how these work.

Like other objects and cameras, you can move the virtual cameras in the scene view to create a ‘shot.’ Once you have done that, back in the timeline, you can create a cinemachine track. In here, place the Main Camera, or any object holding the Cinemachine Brain. They you can clip and track the other virtual cameras to create a cutscene where the camera shots ‘cut’ between each other.

Using an Animation track to move these cameras while create camera movement within the cutscene.

With all of this, you should now have the abilities to play around with Timeline and make something of your own. Give it a shot.