Behind the Cut-scenes: How to make 3D cutscenes in Unity

The following is a quick overview of how I made a 3D cutscene for my game, Quixotic Quest, and how you can too. It's actually a lot easier than you might expect, though it may still be time consuming. Before we begin, check out my demo of this if you haven't already:

The most important thing to understand about this scene is that it's actually all taking place on one terrain, with multiple cameras throughout the terrain that are turned on and off programmatically. Don't believe me? Have a look at my scene, Cutscene2.unity:

1: The first 2 cuts of the scene: with the king and his castle.

2: The king's grave, simple version.

3: The king's grave, with Don and some background.

4: Path that bandits march on.

5: Text that shows up at bottom of screen (changed via script).

Looking back on it I wish I took a better screenshot that included the positions of the 5 cameras as well, but I'm too lazy to go back and change it. If you're really interested, shoot me an email at yin4thewin@gmail.com or leave a comment.

Anyway, let's look at the script I use to transition between cameras.

It's a lot of text, but all I do is store all cameras in an array and start with just the first one enabled. Then, in a coroutine,  I switch to a different camera, changing the text field as well along the way.

The last thing worth noting is that I had 24 soldiers marching in that last scene. Instead of writing 2 lines of code to make them walk for each and every character, I simply renamed the game objects to use the same format of "Rouge (x)", where x is a number. Therefore I can use GameObject.Find() and increment a for-loop to get Rouge(0), Rouge(1), Rouge(2), etc. It's a very "bandage-y" solution that I just thought of to save time, but if you have a similar issue I'm sure you can implement something like this as well.

That's all for now. I just wanted to post this because I love writing documentation for some reason. 

Until next time,

YinFTW