You are the director with Timeline
Call the shots and create rich cinematic content, cutscenes, and gameplay sequences.
Perfect for artists and designers
With Timeline, you have the power to work in-context and iterate until the content is just right. It’s a powerful, yet user-friendly tool, that enables you to:
- Create rich content using your game objects, animations, sounds, particles, and other scene elements
- Compose, choreograph, and orchestrate animations, cameras, audio, and any other game objects
- Generate content faster: Use a familiar multitrack interface to “drag and drop” objects and control and record animations to create rich scenes quickly
Faster iteration, shorter creation cycles
Traditionally, when creating game-object interactions with a variety of possible outcomes, each outcome had to be programmed. Now you can use Timeline to replace code for many scenarios, such as:
- Timing game-object interactions
- Creating transitions between animations
- Composing cutscenes, cinematics, and gameplay sequences
- Creating environment patterns such as weather, time, and seasons
Use Timeline for more than just linear content and cutscenes like in Adam. Artists and designers can now create multiple Timelines with variations to the interactions, and each one can be called according to the gameplay scenario.
Produce cinematics and cutscenes
- Sequence clips and audio like in video editing
- Use smart Cinemachine cameras
- Add Post-Processing effects and color grading
Build world, level, and environment scenes faster
- Sequence and animate scene elements
- Trigger and cue events
- Add effects like lens flares and particles
Control animations without code
- Record new, or use existing animations, and position them in time
- Adjust, loop, and blend different animation sequences
- Work with multiple characters/objects at the same time
Create and manage scenes with a graphical UI
- Transition from Gameplay to cutscene and back
- Control non-player characters
- Play video and audio, and particles
Gain a new level of control with Timeline
Timeline gives you complete creative freedom and the ability to solve problems when composing your scene and orchestrating your elements. With it, you can use different tracks to affect different behaviors and settings in order to:
- Gain explicit control over game-object activation and animation regulating each game object individually by one or more track types
- Animate unique object parameters for layered effects by applying multiple tracks
- Get just the behavior you’re looking for using combinations of modifiers
- Keep project management tidy by grouping, expanding, and collapsing tracks and controlling other Timelines
Extend artist and designer freedom with customizable playables
Developers can easily extend Timeline functionality for artists and designers. Playables enable advanced behaviors, automation, and custom controls.
You can use our Default Playables for commonly used scenarios (including LightControl, NavMeshControl, ScreenFader, TextSwitcher, TimeDilation, TransformTween, and Video) and a Playable Wizard to speed-up creation of your own ideas.
Freeing artists to create
It was pretty amazing to see how easily we could author full blown cinematics with reorderable shots and WYSIWYG with such a tight production schedule.
We're able to work interactively on our shots in a non-linear manner, much as one would in a high-end 3D package or editing suite. It simply wouldn’t have been possible without Timeline.
The experience is highly scripted and linear, and Timeline made it easy to trigger animations, music and events so we could just slide things around and change them in real-time.
Timeline lets us intuitively orchestrate sounds, music cues, particle effects, and animations, so we can focus on what matters most: the story.
The familiar NLE interface granted non-programmer members of the team the power to easily tweak animations without requiring any coding skills. I'm honestly not sure how we would have built Zero Days VR without Timeline.
Getting started with Timeline
Get off to a good start
Check out the Unity tutorials page.
Watch videos
See more examples of Timeline in action, including the power of Timeline and Cinemachine Together. Check out the Timeline & Cinemachine playlist on YouTube.
Get answers to specific questions
Refer to Timeline documentation, and discover more about Timeline in the Unity Timeline forum.