skipping a cutscene

I implemented the new Cinemachine 2D stuff in my new game for the opening sequence, which transitions between cameras for: level overview cam => objective cam 1 => objective cam 2 => objective cam 3 => level overview => game cam for however many objectives are in the scene.

This is the timeline:
https://i.imgur.com/OTOGJUv.png

The net result is a nice clean opening sequence
https://i.imgur.com/02NKR2r.mp4

The only problem is after you've tried the level a few times it can get boring so I need to implement skipping of the sequence.

My current implementation has two levels of skipping, where the first skip is to the countdown, and the second skip can bypass the countdown as well. It works by just advancing the playable director to the right timestamps in the clip.

The first skip is not terrible but you can see it does a full harsh cut to the level camera when a very quick transition would be preferred:
https://i.imgur.com/8Br2qYW.mp4

The second skip is worse because the cut between the level camera and the actual game camera is a little more harsh:
https://i.imgur.com/Fu4BITQ.gifv

There was another thread with some discussion about skipping here https://forum.unity.com/threads/tra...imeline-animation-skipping-a-cutscene.502526/. The solution proposed was to swap to a second timeline. I could probably do that for the countdown skip because that one is always from the level overview camera to the game camera. But the first skip to the countdown is trickier as they might want to skip while it is is on any of the 3 (or more/less, depending on scene) objective cameras. And so to use that method I would need to make 3 skip timelines, for each objective they could trigger the skip from and then wire my skipping script up to know which skip timeline to use for which position in the timeline.

Is there a better way to achieve a smooth cut?

 

Ah right, I definitely didn't realize you could just have an open blend like that at the beginning.

Thanks for the quick reply, this is absolutely going to help. Can't wait to try it out. I am loving cinemachine more and more every day.

 

I tried it out but it didn't really seem to work like I wanted to, although those open blends are still going to be useful for other scenarios.

So to try it out I created a second shorter timeline like this:

and then triggering a skip would stop the longer timeline and start another playable director with this shorter timeline.

What ends up happening is that it quickly cuts to the game camera (as it is the highest priority after stopping the first timeline) and then blends from there to the level cam, rather than blending from the shot that the timeline was on when I triggered the skip as I was hoping.

I also tried a slightly different approach throwing a different camera transition on another track of the same timeline, and then having my script mute the original track and unmute a track with the shorter transition, along with my earlier timestamp scrub to the skip position, but it's the same problem where it cuts back to the game cam and then transitions from there.

 

I just tried that, it does achieve the blend!! Although now I have to contend with content from the other tracks blending when both timelines are enabled together. Which I am thinking of solving by muting the extra tracks in code, but it feels a bit awkward as the mute state gets remembered after I stop the game and go back to the editor.

 

I ended up switching from using a cinemachine track, to using a set of activation tracks that turn on and off the various cameras in the scene. The default blend on the cinemachine brain then ends up handling the transitions the same way I had them in the cinemachine track.

Implementing the "skip" functionality is then still just a matter of scrubbing the timeline to where I want like these red lines:

Pretty happy with the way it's working now.