Combining Cinemachine and Timeline for Ultimate Control
When combining Cinemachine and Timeline, you can add all sorts of interesting camera angles to your animation to create cutscenes. Let’s have a look at how you can combine both.
Objective: Combine Cinemachine and Timeline to create a simple sequence that transitions from gameplay to cutscene and back to gameplay.
Table of Contents
· Adding a Virtual Camera to your Timeline
∘ Treasure Chest System Combined with Cimenachine
If you’re new to Cinemachine and Timeline, make sure to check out my articles here.
Adding a Virtual Camera to your Timeline
Combining Cinemachine and Timeline is as easy as setting up a virtual camera and then adding it to your Timeline. Let’s take a look at the treasure chest system from the previous article, we already have our little animation set up, now all we need is a new camera angle that triggers along with it.
- Create a virtual camera via Cinemachine → Virtual Camera
2. Position your camera at the desired angle, and make sure you’re looking through the right camera by clicking on the Solo in the Inspector while your virtual camera is selected.
This is the angle I’ve chosen for my virtual camera.
3. Drag and drop the virtual camera into your Timeline, then make sure you select Add Clip with Cinemachine Track.
4. Adjust the length of your cinemachine track to make sure the camera remains active for as long as you like. Mine will be active for the duration of the collection of tracks in my Timeline.
5. Make sure to add your Cinemachine Brain into the respective slot in your Timeline, this is how Unity determines which camera is currently active.
Treasure Chest System Combined with Cimenachine
Here’s the result of adding a virtual camera to my pre-existing Treasure Chest System. The camera view will stay locked for its duration in the Timeline then return to our regular 3rd person camera. This animation is triggered on key-press, be sure to check out the full article on the Treasure Chest System here.
Before adding the virtual camera, I could move the 3rd-person camera during the cutscene and the camera movement was unsteady as the animation played.
