Introduction to Timeline in Unity

Now that we have our two scenes set up, we can look to implement the virtual camera’s into Timeline. Timeline is a feature that allows you to edit music, show/hide objects, control particles, play animations, etc. It is a great feature that can be used for cinematic events, as it gives you the control over all the events over a period of time.
To start, we have to add timeline into our display of the editor:

From here, we will rearrange our windows as to be able to utilize our editing in timeline so that we can see what happens when we play the event:

You can edit it however you feel fit, but with this layout, we get a good amount of space to make our edits in the timeline. Next, we are going to create a folder for our timeline and start connecting our varying objects to it:

From here, we will want to delete the current animation from the editor, as we do want to place this here. As well, we will delete the animator off of our Sleeping_Guard_CS empty object.
Once we have that all done, we can add our main camera into timeline, as we need a Cinematic brain within the timeline to have our cutscene work proper:

As we will be working in seconds, we will want to adjust the format presented to us from frames to seconds:

Next, we will start to add in our camera angles that we created and allow a transition between our different cameras:

Now that we have our camera’s in the sequence, we can see how it looks in our game view:

A nice little feature with Timeline is that if we had wanted to blend our camera’s together for a different style of transition, we can simply just drag the edge of the time block for 1 camera over into the other time block and it will pan over to the other camera:

Depending on the length of the shared space is how quick our scene rotates to the other camera.
Next, let’s get our actors into the sequence so that we can see how our camera changes works with the actual animation:

From here, we will now select the animation clip we wish to use, and test it by dragging the white bar around. This method of testing makes it a lot easier on us to see if our animation lines up well with the flipping of our camera:

Now that we have a basic understanding of how to get things going in Timeline, we will look into how we go about finishing this cutscene in another article.