Timeline Director — Winning the race!

Objective: Create a dynamic cinematic using Timeline and Cinemachine!

In this tutorial we are going to use what we’ve learned with Timeline, Avatar Masks, and Cinemachine. We begin the same way we always do with making an empty game object and creating a Timeline. With that done, take your model and place it in the scene, childed to the director object.

This model looks great, seems like as good a runner as any other. With the position decided and the model childed to your director we can start working in the Timeline. Drop the model onto the Timeline as an animation track.

Now we can take our running animation and drop them on this animation track.

let’s pull this animation out and loop it to give our character a longer run.

Now that zombie can move. Let’s create a point where they passed a finish line. I’ll use pre-vis 3D objects for now, feel free to use whatever you like.

We did it, this little zombie has reached the end of the race and now it’s time to celebrate. So we can now add a celebration animation, however we want to keep running with the momentum and so we need to create an Avatar mask.

We only want to override the top halp of the model so disable the legs, and position on the mask.

Now we need an override track. Click the option button the the animation track and add and override track.

Now we can add one of our celebration animatiosn to the override track.

Select the track and add the Avatar mask.

Now we can add another celebration, place this on the animation track to reset the legs. Make sure to select ‘match offset of previous clip’ to match the models current position.

Don’t forget if you clips don’t line up smoothly, you can use ‘Clip Transform Offsets’ to move the model and blend animations smoother.

For the sake of commedy I’m going to add an injured walk after the final celebration. Remember, I’m using a zombie, and they are not known for the… posture.

I’m also a fan of hilarious fanfare and since this zombie decided to run this race let’s add more over the top celebration by adding some particle effects when he crosses the finish line.

I accomplished this by created another timeline and positioned at the base of the pillars I made I placed two particle effects.

You could end here but I wanted to give more of a firework effect, so I changed the start speed to be set randomly between two constants. I lowered the start size, added a little gravity. In the emission tab I set the Rate over Time to zero and added a bust and set the count to 45.

Now we need to combine the two Timelines. On the original zombie Timeline I added a Control Track and placed the particle Timeline on it.