Intro to Unity Timeline - Bilingual Subtitles
In this video, we'll have a look at the new timeline editor in Unity 2017.
We'll a look at how you can add and combine different types of tracks to create cut scenes and call events.
Also special thanks to Judamine and Hans HaveToon for their support on Patreon.
So let's get into it.
So here we have a simple scene that consists of four vehicles, a hanger environment, and of course a camera.
The vehicles are from dev assets and I will of course have a link for them in the description.
Now to open up timeline we go window and select the timeline editor.
I'm just going to dark this down by the animation panel.
And the first thing that we're going to do is create an empty game object where our timeline data can sit.
Let's go to the hierarchy, go right click, create empty.
Let's reset the transform on this.
Let's rename.
it to timeline and you can see now that inside of the timeline window it says to begin a new timeline
create a director component and a timeline asset now it can do this for us if we simply hit create
first we get to name our timeline asset this is also what we refer to as a playable and we can
just call this our cutscene let's then hit save and And can see now that the cutscene appears in the project.
You also see that it's added two components to our timeline.
The first one is a playable director and this references our cutscene playable object.
Here we can adjust stuff like whether or we play when we start the game and
whether or not we wanted to loop once it's done.
It also created an animator community.
component.
And this is actually not something that we need.
This is just because timeline assumes that the object that you create the timeline on is going to be animated as well.
And you can see down here in our timeline window,
we now have a timeline that we can scrub through, and we have a single track.
This track refers to the timeline object itself.
So we can actually just delete this,
because we don't want to be animating our timeline object and we can actually go and select that and remove the animator as well.
So we have no tracks in our timeline.
Let's go ahead and add a new one and here we have a bunch of different ones to choose from.
We're going to be creating an animation track.
This is probably the most common track and it's what we use whenever we want to play animation in our game.
Now I don't have any animation done yet,
so I simply want to take the object that I want to animate which is the big T90 in center here and drag it into this slot.
It's then going to prompt me to create an animator on this T90 which I'll just go ahead and do.
Now I can simply hit the record button and I can then start keyframing different parts of my T90.
I'm going to find the turret pivot.
find a good start rotation, go forward a bit on the timeline, and right now this is displayed in frames.
We can change this by going to the cog and selecting seconds instead.
I think three seconds sounds about right.
I can then rotate it over and it's going to insert a keyframe, and we can now see that this is animating over time.
I also want to animate my gun pivot,
so I'm gonna go back a few frames,
set the starting key frame here, about there seems right, go forward a little bit and I'm going to animate this up.
So now we can stop recording, go back and hit play and we can see our animation playing.
If you then want to go back and edit your animation,
we can click the curves here to edit the individual curves or we can simply double click on the track to be
taken the animation window.
Here we can make our adjustments and as soon as we go back to timeline we can see the changes.
But right now we are only animating one object and the strength of timeline is the ability to mix together multiple animations.
So let's go and add another one.
This time let's reference our Humvee over here, let's drag him in and create an animator on him.
Again that's it, record.
I'm to select the Humvee, set a start position, move forward in time a bit, and animate him forward.
So now as we scrub through, we can see our two animations playing together.
Let's stop recording.
And right now we can see and adjust all of the individual keyframes.
But if we have a lot of objects in here, this quickly becomes very hard to manage.
And we can't really adjust the timing between these two clips.
without going in and editing the keyframes.
Let's first right click on a t90 track and hit convert to clip track.
This is going to take all of our keyframes and turn them into one single clip that we can easily manage.
We can select this clip and rename it to say t90 aim and let's also do the same thing for a Humvee.
So let's right click go convert to clip track and let's name this humbly drive and now we can mix these together in any way that we
want.
We can change the timing or we can even adjust the length of these clips.
If we now play we can see that our T90 starts aiming long before our humbly starts driving but after our T90 finishes
its aim it simply freezes.
If we click on the T90 clip we can change this by going under post extrapolate.
This means what happens to the animation after it's done playing and right now it's just set to hold so whatever the end frame it will just hold that into infinity.
But try and change this to something like ping pong.
This means as soon as the animation reaches its end it will play back in reverse.
So if you now play our sequence we should see that the T90 keeps animating.
And indeed it does.
Of course we want to stay organized in our timeline.
Let's go add to create a track group.
Here we can group together multiple tracks.
Let's rename these two vehicles.
and let's drag in both our tracks.
Now the next type of track that we want to look at is the activation track.
This allows us to simply enable or disable a game object.
It's really that symbol and in the scene here I actually have two cameras.
I have a camera that focuses on the T90 and I have a camera that focuses on the Humvee.
So in our timeline we can use the activation track to switch between them.
We want to start with the camera.
We can then add another activation track, and here we can reference the camera on a Humvee.
So in the beginning, we only want the camera on the T90 to be active.
Let's drag out the camera on a Humvee.
And then after a little while, we can switch over to the Humvee camera.
So if we now open up our vehicles group, we can see that we switch the camera right before the homely starts driving.
And as it exits the frame we can go back to our original camera.
To do that we select the clip, hit Ctrl D or Command D if you're on the Mac to duplicate and simply drag it over.
And we can also extend the lifetime here to the end of our timeline.
So now if we play this back we should see that we have some nice switching between the cameras.
and it's actually starting to look like a cutscene.
Let's again go ahead and add a track group for our new camera controls.
Let's drag both our camera tracks in there.
You can of course also add pre-made animation to our timeline.
So if you want your character to play some animation we could simply add an animation track.
You would then link the character and then you can simply dragon animation clips to add them together.
So it basically works in the exact same way that it did with our vehicles.
And I think this is probably the best part about timeline is that you can basically drag in anything you'd like and it's just gonna play it.
A good example of this is sound.
So if we go under our sounds folder, I have two sounds here.
I have some ambience and I have an engine start,
we can simply take our ambience and drag it into timeline,
it's gonna automatically create an audio track for us and we can simply make the clip a bit shorter.
A really cool thing is to focus on a clip you can simply select it and hit F just like you would in the scene view.
So let's now trim this to fill out the entire sequence and I also want to add the engine start.
Now this has a bit of room before the engine actually starts.
If you're going here we can actually see that it's around two seconds.
Let's take our engine start, drag it into timeline.
Let's trim it for about two seconds.
Let's then open up our vehicle so we can see when our Humvee starts driving.
Let's start the engine just a tad before that.
Now if you hit play, your sound won't.
preview.
Unfortunately you still have to play the game in order to hear your sound working.
So let's press play to try it out.
We hear the ambience and maybe we are a bit too late on the engine sound.
So fix that we'll simply drag the clip a tiny bit to the left.
Let's again try and hit play.
And this time it works beautifully.
Finally, let's make sure to trim our engine start sound to the timeline length as well.
And to clean everything up, we can add a track group for all of our audio.
So that should be it for our preview of the timeline editor.
Awesome.
So of course, timeline is still very new.
And I'm...
definitely excited to see where they'll take it from here.
But I the tool's already a great starting point for creating cutscenes and in-game events.
And now that we have Timeline, I hope to see more short films made with Unity.
So if you make something cool using the Timeline, definitely make sure to send it to me at BrackysTweet over on Twitter.
On that, thanks for watching, and I will see you in the next video.
Thanks to all of the awesome players!
Patreon supporters who donated in September.
And thanks to Judaman,
Hans Haftun,
Ziegjabali, Superman, The Great, James P, Jasper Miggison, Thomas Volley, Cyborg Mummy, Jason Nautito, Derek Heamskerk, Faisa
Marafai, Nick Lang, Khusam Kazaa, Aaron, Robert Boon, and Peter Locke.
If your name's not on the list, I'll make sure to include you later this month and the next month.
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