Summary
I am sure the idea of animating a vehicle for cut scene is not a first here. Its easy to animate a non physical car in a straight line and (if you work hard enough) turns and curves but I was never able to pull off a good animation with it. However in a game where the vehicle is a physical object and you need to have cut scenes that have good transition and accurate outcomes it becomes difficult to manage.
Attempts
1.) I tried the first one, “Animating the vehicle in timeline”. The first result of this made me realize the car doesn’t move at all in play mode because the car is driven by physics (I am using Realistic Car Controller), so I cannot work on it until I strip/Disable all its codes/components. This does result in a accurate outcome however the vehicle cannot have dynamic transition from Cut scene to game play eg. where the car is already accelerating as the camera eases in (in this case the car will halt and slowly start accelerating after gaining control). This also makes the work tedious as a animator will have to handcraft animations for all the vehicle parts. If you guys have tried RCC you know that doing that can be nearly impossible.
2.) I tried using Timeline Signals. I basically had a script with which i could apply custom steering/gas/Brake/ inputs to the car from the signal. This seemed like a good idea until I realized that keeping track of where it should start from in every camera shot will need to set a new offset for the car. Also the problem of the outcome not really being accurate. While it is possible to trial and error to find what values to apply and where to offset. the result seems to not replicate in each play. also possibly sometimes not even going to its target location in time. So the cut-scene sometimes wont look right. example of this can be - a timed car crash, a timed ambush, a chase cut scene(this one almost doesn’t work out many times).
Conclusion
I am still new to timeline and the concept of vehicle cut scene so I am not aware of what is the best way of getting at it. I would really appreciate if you could suggest better and less tedious workflow for vehicle cut scenes where I can keep the car dynamic and still have accurate outcome.
Reference
The Types of cut scenes that I will need to make