So Unite LA 2016 happened and it was a wonderful experience. There were plenty of cool things to get excited about with Unity 5.6. Unity’s Cinematics Department (didn’t even know that was a thing!) is developing an invaluable tool called “Timeline”. In their Breakout talk they said the product will be available for open beta next year, but that right now they are in closed beta and accepting requests.
Well, after googling this every which way I can think of (Unity REALLY has to start naming their stuff with more unique nomenclature ;)) I cannot for the life of me even find an announcement that this is in development (aside from mentions in blogs and posts about the keynote.
Didn’t see anything in the beta forum about this so I’m assuming it’s still not ready for testing? If there’s a link I’m too stupid to see, I would much appreciate a kind person showing me the way.
Doesn’t really work. I was in a job interview today discussing Unity animation. Neither myself or the interviewer could actually work out the correct pronunciation of mecanim. So we spent the whole time referring to it as Unity’s animation system.
Up until about three years ago, I thought SoftImage was pronounced “soft” and “image” - as in the noun. Only wen I attended SIGGRAPH did I learn (in quite a snooty way) that “image” was actually pronounced with a soft a like in “malt liquor”. That doesn’t confuse me on the product at all though, I know when it’s SoftImage from text and speech even if with a twinge at the hipness of it all.
Point is, for a search engine user (which should be everyone) using basic names like “Unity UI” makes it very difficult to find information relative to your actual inquiry. Especially if, like me, you like to push beyond the (admittedly diverse and expansive) boundaries of what we can do with the tool. It’s hard enough searching for something that probably doesn’t get discussed too often.
…That’s not to say there aren’t scenarios in which this doesn’t apply. “Navigation” works perfectly well especially when paired with “Unity”. I feel like I don’t run into this issue at all when looking up questions related to that. But I think that’s because Navigation is a pretty specific subset within a subset. For general things like animation, it just really makes the job of hunting down information easier when they come up with unique names.
I’m not sure if any of that up there made any sense at all. My brain to text system has been a bit on the fritz today…
“search engine user (which should be everyone) using basic names like “Unity UI” makes it very difficult to find information relative to your actual inquiry”
Yeh tell me about it. sifting through results from Ubuntu shit(I only say that because Ubuntu has more bugs and shit design that it makes windows XP released well over a decade ago seem amazing in comparison) …its unfortunate they also called there UI engine Unity.
“Unity REALLY has to start naming their stuff with more unique nomenclature”
The choice of session names at Unite were also often… questionable.
The Timeline breakout was called “Cinematics & Storytelling in Unity” for some reason, even though Timeline goes far beyond controlling animation or even cinematics, and maybe half of the session was showing all the other cool stuff Timeline could do. Watch for it to show up on YouTube, that’ll give you the best intro right now.
Pretty sure it isn’t available in a repo yet or anything of that nature. If I remember right, it has been in private alpha-stage testing and is supposed to go to public beta at the beginning of the year, and they kept saying 5.6 would release later next year, so that’s your timeline for Timeline.
Hi there, I am the product manager overseeing the Timeline feature.
You are correct that Timeline is currently in a closed Alpha currently, although we are working to get a public experimental build available as soon as possible. We’re very excited to get the feature into your hands and can’t wait to hear more about what everyone ends up using the tool for.
If you have specific questions about Timeline, please feel free to reach out to me directly.
Just wanted to point out that Cinemachine part of Unity timeline is now free on the asset store:
I didn’t see any mention anywhere, maybe everybody is still on holiday.
As for the asset itself, it’s nice but maybe a little to complicate to use for my taste. I’ll continue to use my own custom solution(equally complicated, but I know it since I did it ) and take some inspiration from this.
Thanks for pointing that out! Sorry for not cross-posting it previously (couldn’t remember where this thread was).
The launch has been a little ‘quiet’ so far because Timeline (and the resulting Cinemachine integration into Timeline) is not yet publicly available. We’re aiming for a first public preview build later this month, and if all goes well, then we’ll start ‘spreading the news’ further ;}
At this point I think google has caught on to what I search for primarily so when I type Unity UI all my results are about Unity as an engine instead of the Unity UI in Ubuntu, so that’s nice.
UGUI was officially renamed to Unity UI upon release. However, im sure it will still be called ‘UGUI’ for years and years and years to come (Much like ‘Mecanim’ for Animator, ‘Shruiken’ for Particle System, etc)
Anyway, i’ve used Timeline and its ridiculously great fun! The Playable API (For creating custom tracks and ‘clip behaviours’) is VERY powerful; can’t wait to see what our community will make with it!
