Activation Track | Getting Started with Timeline (Unity)

in this tutorial we will get started with timeline [Music] hi everyone this is armor buffer if you're a subscriber welcome back if not welcome to this channel where i create game development tutorials and from time to time i upload my short films so if you're interested subscribe and hit the bell icon to get notified whenever new video is uploaded today i'm super excited to start a new series which is getting started with timeline and yes i said a series not a single tutorial because i think that timeline is such an amazing feature and one tutorial is not going to be enough so i'm planning to create an individual tutorial for each of its tracks if you don't know what timeline is well it's an amazing tool in unity that you can use to create cutscenes animations and so on i hope you're excited let's get into it to create our first timeline we have to open the timeline window so go to window sequencing and then timeline and you will see this empty window which is the timeline i'm just going to dock it here as you can see it says to start creating a timeline select game object for that i'm just going to create an empty game object and let's just call it timeline now we can just click here to create a director component and a timeline asset so i'm going to click here and you can name your timeline so i'm just going to name it test timeline you will see that in our timeline there is a new component which is the playable director and there is a timeline already assigned here so if i click on it you will see it in the project window here it has already created a timeline asset for us so now we just created our first timeline the other settings here we won't get into them at the moment so let's start playing around with the timeline as you can see nothing is here yet to create a track you can either click on the plus icon here or just right click and you will see a bunch of options in today's tutorial we'll just get into the activation track which is basically controlling the state of a game object whether to set it as shown or hidden active or inactive i know it's simple but we're going to create a lot of cool things with it and i'm going to show you a couple of examples of how you can implement that into very useful cases so let's create an activation track nothing is happening yet as you can see it's it says none it's looking for a game object so as for the first example let's just create a simple blinking between the green and red light so i'm gonna select the green light as you can see once you select something outside the timeline it's gone so for best practices select the timeline and make sure to lock it by clicking on the lock icon here so now no matter what i select it's still active here so now we want to select the green light and just assign it here and still nothing is happening but look what happens after i pass this active clip it goes inactive all right so let's add the red one as well you can do it in another way which is just dragging the object to the timeline and it will ask us which track we want to create in our case we just want to create an activation track so i'm just going to click that and you can see after we passed these two clips both of them just disappeared what we want to do is we want to show one and then show the other so if i hit play you'll see that one of them is playing and then the other also as a shortcut to play you can just hit space and it will play the timeline for you so let's hit play and see what we have alright cool now it just blinked once but what if we want them to keep on switching so we're gonna select the timeline again and there is the wrap mode at the moment it's none so let's change it to loop look what happens it will keep on playing the timeline so it will be switching from green to red back to green and then red and so on pretty cool right and to give a similar example what if we have this cube and we want to switch between a variety of objects so i'm just going to select three of them here and just drag them activation so we can go here we're going to select the three clips and then hit s to split the clips and then just delete that and we can move them around and look what we have they keep on switching so i know this is a very very simple example but don't worry now we're going to jump into more advanced examples to see how you can implement them i'm just going to drag the timeline here and select it so what do we have here is just two characters are talking you don't have to worry about the animation because it's going to be in the next tutorial now we just want to play around with the activation track so again i have to lock the timeline so i can select the other objects and now in our scene we have three different cameras this is one this is the other and then we have a wider shot of both of the characters so to start implementing these cameras and switch between them let's select three of them and just drag them here as an activation track all right camera three is the white one so i wanted to start with that and then we can just switch between the other two cameras here just make it stop here so if we hit play now look at what we have so this is basically the second example you can use activation layers to switch between different cameras and don't worry about cameras a lot because we're going to cover that in a future tutorial we're going to see how to switch between cinema scene cameras and that's going to be really interesting also we have another example which is this all right so what is going on here is we actually have two different objects one is this object in the ground it's called ground object and you will see here that it will get deactivated and you can see here we have another object that gets activated which is the child of the character's hand so it plays with the animation if i stretch that back you will see that there are actually two instances of the same object and this is actually a common trick that has been used in a lot of games so once your player is picking up something it will just hide the one on the ground and activate the other object that the player is already holding so as you can see now we're switching between them simultaneously without even spotting the difference of the two objects and this is a very very common use of switching objects in the last example here we have a soldier running and we've been spawning these explosions just with the activation if i select the timeline and here we have the explosions you can see that all of them are hidden and inside our timeline we just have a simple animation track where the character is running and then we have five different activation tracks to toggle the explosions you'll notice that as i play through the activation clips the explosions are being triggered on the right side it keeps activating and deactivating the different explosions to give us the cool action scene that we have here so that's it for this tutorial i know activation track is a very simple feature but i just wanted to give you as many examples as possible so you can be even more creative and implement that into your own game cutscenes or even short films if you have any questions about timeline or any other thing about unity just write them down in the comments and hopefully in the next tutorial we'll talk about the animation track which is going to be more fun and let me know if you have any suggestions and again if you haven't subscribed and you want to see more of these tutorials subscribe and hit the bell icon to get notified whenever a new video is uploaded this is omar bafiki thank you so much for watching i'll see you in the next video bye-bye

Channel: Omar A. Balfaqih

Views: 24,169

Keywords: Unity3D, game development, tutorial, animator, game design, cinemachine clear shot, unity cinemachine, games cinematography, games directing, unity camera effects, unity camera movements, games cameras, Activation Track | Getting Started with Timeline (Unity), Unity timeline, getting started with timeline, unity timeline tutorial, unity activation track, unity cutscenes, unity pick up ojects, unity cinematics, intro to unity timeline, unity timeline for beginners

Id: 7vstIbCYqyA

Length: 9min 52sec (592 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 06 2020