Timeline in Unity

In this article we will use the Timeline of Unity to continue working on our cutscene.

What is the Timeline in Unity

The Timeline in Unity is way to visually edit a sequence of events along the time axis. Events can be music, play animation, particles, enable or disable objects, move objects around etc etc.

Create a new Timeline

Select the cutscene gameobject that contains our virtual camera’s and actors.
Window > Timeline (panel) > click Create (button)
It is recommended to create a separate folder to save our timelines in. When it is created it should look something like the image below.

On our Cutscene gameobject we remove the Animator component. We only need the Playable Director component here, since we aren’t animating our Cutscene gameobject itself. So also remove it from the timeline.

Playable director decides when our cutscene gameobject is enabled and plays. We can do this through code and let it play the timeline asset.

To use the cinemachine virtual camera’s in our timeline we need to add the main camera.
Timeline (panel) > Add > Cinemachine.Timeline > Cinemachine Track > Select Main Camera for the Cinemachine Brain

Timeline Settings to Seconds

Timeline (panel) > Gear icon (top right) > Seconds

Use Virtual Camera’s from Timeline

Now we are ready to use our virtual camera’s from our timeline.
R-Click in Timeline > Add Cimemachine Shot Clip

Inspector > Virtual Camera > Drag in our Virtual Camera

Repeat these two steps for our second virtual camera.

Adjust Duration of a Clip by simply dragging

Preview Timeline

With the Play button we can get a preview of our Timeline.

Bonus: Blend shots

Currently it’s a hard cut from shot to shot. It’s also possible to blend.
Drag one shot into the other. You can adjust the duration with it too.

Let’s preview the blend.