Adding Camera Animation for a Cutscene

Objective: use the timeline and animation tools to animate the camera.

First we’ll add a new animation track to the timeline.

We want to use this track to animate the over-the-shoulder camera, so we drag that camera from the hierarchy into the new track.

Now we can add animation to this camera by clicking the record button:

While this track is recording, we can select this virtual camera in the hierarchy and move it to create keyframes in the animation track. These are saved positions that the camera will automatically move to as this animation plays. We can move the camera very slightly to make the first keyframe:

Then we slide the white line to the right and move the camera up and right to make another keyframe. If we play back the animation now, it will smoothly transition from one position to the other.

If we want to make changes to the animation, we can double click a keyframe to open up the animation window. The keyframes for just this camera are displayed here.

We can add some extra rotation at this keyframe just by moving it while it’s recording.

We can also lengthen or shorten the animation by dragging the keyframes.

That’s all the basics for making animated movement in Unity! Now this cutscene is coming along quite nicely.