Creating Cutscenes in Unity with Timeline/Cinemachine

Mike Brisson
2 min readMay 13, 2021

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When composing cutscenes, you might have many moving parts. Timeline helps you take control of cameras along with animations in one location.

While Timeline is integrated into Unity, Cinemachine is a package that needs to be added separately:

With Cinemachine installed, you’ll need to add the Cinemachine ‘brain’ component to your camera:

For each camera you want in the scene, you will need to add a virtual camera. In this example, we’ll use 2:

For each scene, it’s best to have an empty object set as the parent. Then add the virtual cameras along with the subjects to that object:

Click on your parent object and within the Timeline window click “Create”:

To transition between cameras, we must first add the Cinemachine Brain into the current Timeline. The easiest way to accomplish this is to simply drag the main camera (with a cinemachine brain already attached) into the timeline window:

Finally we can drag our virtual cameras into the time row:

You can maually adjust the length of each camera and even overlap them to transition between them for a final scene that looks like this:

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