In my previous articles, I’ve shared how I’ve created animations for power ups and explosions that are triggered when power ups appear or when enemies are destroyed. However, when it’s time to coordinate several animations, camera positioning, object activation, mainly components that make a cutscene, we can use Unity Timeline.
Below is the animation of “Darren” stealing the security card from a sleeping security guard.
With Timeline, let’s see how we can construct an interesting cutscene with this. I’ll be using Cinemachine for the cameras. I created two Cinemachine Virtual Cameras and an Empty GameObject to host the Timeline.
I selected the empty game object and from the Timeline Window, I clicked the Create button.
To use Cinemachine on Timeline, you need to add a Cinemachine Brain to your Camera.
Then drag the Camera to Timeline:
You can place the Virtual Camera along the dope sheet of the Main Camera. You can also add animation used so that you can preview the animation while editing Timeline.
Here’s a combination of panning the virtual cameras via setting up animations to the virtual camera or the object its looking at. Also, I added Object activation to show the card while it’s on the lap of the guard and disappear when “Darren” takes the card.
The Timeline can be played on-awake so just activating an inactive object can trigger it. For now, here’s how it looks like.
