GameDevHQ Crash Course #20 I am a director now

Stealth Game & Cinematography-Timeline

This time we are working on our first cutscene. Unity has a incredibly powerful tool for this called timeline, which is installed through Package Manager. This tool allows you to make custom cameras that you can switch to, rotate through and move with to make dynamic cutscenes.

Here is the end result of a 6 second cutscene.

Using three different camera shots, excluding the original camera position, we are also animating a fade in and fade out effect, making an object disappear at a point, having the original objects disappear till the end of the cutscene as we have animated cutscene versions of the characters.

Using the red button the left in the previous image, you can set animation events to happen during certain frames of a cutscene, a wonderful tool of the timeline is that you can sift through the different frames and have it show in the game view so you can get the cutscene just right. Unfortunately you can no preview audio outside of play mode, however once you are in play mode, you can then sift through the timeline in the editor to have the audio play so you can make edits, because unlike the normal unity editor, the edits you do in timeline are kept after exiting play mode.

We can also become a real professional director by using some dolly track shots. these are nice smooth camera pans that can go through multiple curves between two points.

To get this effect without dolly track you you have to have 3–4 different cameras or animate the camera through multiple different points on the timeline and you still wouldn’t get as smooth a corner as what dolly track gives you. Overall really handy, no wonder film studios use these!