It all comes down to timing — A quick guide to Timeline in Unity

In this article I will go over timeline in Unity, setting it up and the different uses for each track type.

What is timeline?

Timeline is a built in tool in Unity that can be used to create brilliant cut scenes and audio or game play sequences. In the forthcoming articles I will be creating some cinematic cuts scenes using timeline and Cinemachine.

How to set up Timeline

To set up Timeline go to Window > Sequencing > Timeline. This will open the Timeline window.

In order to work with timeline attach the Playable director component to a game object. In this case I will create an empty game object and add the component to that.

Next, while the game object is selected, go to your timeline window and click “Create” this will create a Timeline playable asset.

This creates the new asset and assigns it to the object to the “Playable” field in the playable director component.

In Timeline you can click the plus button to give you several options to pick from.

· Track Group: use this option is for organizing your tracks, click this to create a new group and place all related tracks under the header for easy organization.

· Activation Track: use this option to enable and disable game objects

· Animation Track: use this option to add or create animations within the Timeline window

· Audio Track: use this option to add audio, selecting start/end times and length of the clip

· Control Track: use this option to control nested timeline instances, particle systems, prefab instances or iTimeControl scripts. Particularly helpful for controlling time-related elements of game objects

· Signal Track: use this track to fire off a signal which can be heard by your scripts (like an event)

· Playable Track: use this track to trigger other timeline events

· Cinemachine Track: use this track to control Cinemachine camera.

You are able to preview the timeline sequence and watch this in the scene and game view, keeping in mind audio will not be played unless you enter play mode.

That’s all for now