How to make a Cutscene in Unity

How to make a cutscene in Unity? With the release of Cinema Director, our Unity extension for creating cinematic content, of course I would now recommend it as the best solution.

Cinema Director Timeline Editor for Unity

But what did people do before there was a definitive cutscene editor for Unity?

Well, you have to tell your story somehow. One possible method would be to create a pre rendered cutscene that plays as a video, triggered by something in your game. One of the advantages of this method is that you can make your cinematics look as awesome as you want, and you never have to worry about slowdown. A video is a video, right? Blizzard, creator of Warcraft, Starcraft and Diablo is famous for their awesome pre rendered cinematics. But their cinematics are awesome because they have a team dedicated to making them. They’re animated short films, really. They don’t use any in game assets, everything is created from scratch in order to make the best cinematic experience possible, like you’re watching a movie. This really works… if you have the budget. Furthermore, in today’s mobile world, taking up hundreds of megabytes of space for a pre rendered video on a consumer’s phone probably isn’t the most elegant solution. Having your game packed with videos will bloat your file size, and fast.

How to make a cutscene in Unity?

That’s why we think in game sequencing is the way to go for the rest of us. We can reuse the assets we already have from the game itself, barely adding anything to the file size at all! Plus, the better graphics hardware gets, the closer the gap between our in game cutscenes and awesome pre rendered cinematics will be.

But even this can be difficult out of the box in Unity. You would have to use scripts to move all of  your game objects around in order to tell a story. This can really get in the way of the creative process, and can eat up a lot of time. It’s hard to sequence events over time with just code. You need something to do that mundane scripting for you, controlled by an easy to understand interface. We strongly believe our product Cinema Director will fill that gap. It’s built from the ground up to make it as easy for you to tell your story as possible. We deeply integrated it with Unity, so much so that it’s almost like it disappears after you use it for a while. When you combine it with our other 3 products – our motion capture solution, our advanced camera package, and our cinematic theme package, you get a complete visual storytelling solution.

So why doesn’t Unity have a built in cutscene editing solution?

Cinematics are an important aspect to many game genres, and it’s something people have asked about since Unity’s existence. Unreal Engine has had Matinee for a while. What is Unity thinking? That, we don’t exactly know. But in the keynote at Unite 14, they gave us some hope. At that point in the keynote, Lucas Meijer, Technical Director over at Unity gave us a look into the distant future of Unity. They show off a work in progress visual timeline editor for Unity, much like our very own Cinema Director.

Now this is a step in the right direction! Future users of Unity will have a method of sequencing their cutscene right out of the box in Unity, and that’s really awesome. We here at Cinema Suite got to witness that unveiling in person, at Unite 2014! This is good news for everyone who likes cinematic storytelling in video games.