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

Create with Timeline

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

Gerald Orban, Senior Programmer, Blackbird Interactive

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.

Gerald Orban, Senior Programmer, Blackbird Interactive
Jim Spoto, Engine Technical Director, Oats Studios

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.

Jim Spoto, Engine Technical Director, Oats Studios
Aaron Koblin, co-founder, Within

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.

Aaron Koblin, co-founder, Within
Larry Cutler, Chief Technical Officer, Baobab Studios

Timeline lets us intuitively orchestrate sounds, music cues, particle effects, and animations, so we can focus on what matters most: the story.

Larry Cutler, Chief Technical Officer, Baobab Studios
Elie Zananiri, Technical Director, Zero Days VR

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.

Elie Zananiri, Technical Director, Zero Days VR

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.

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