Unity Cinemachine & Timeline: Learning the basics

Goal: Learn about Cinemachine and Timeline

The next course in GameDevHQ is to master both cinemachine and timeline. These power tools can be downloaded in your Unity project to create extraordinary cutscenes and help game development by providing codeless virtual cameras.

Cinemachine

Cinemachine provides us with the ability to create virtual cameras. These cameras have many different properties coded for us. Allowing the user to do something difficult in the past to be easily done with a few drop-down boxes. These properties allow the user to easily create free-look cameras, target groups, custom blends, and much more. Throughout my time in this course, I will be documenting the different types of virtual cameras I’ll be using in my scenes.

Timeline

Timeline is a tool in Unity that allows us to control/direct animations, music, activate/deactivate objects, and much more. Timeline is a window panel in Unity Editor, much like the animator. These components are blocks on the timeline, and we can adjust their length, speed, and when they are played. Again I’ll be diving deeper into both these tools in Unity through my time in the course and documenting my journey.

These tools can be easily downloaded through Window -> Package Manager and search for Cinemachine or timeline and install.