How to go from cutscene to gameplay in Unity

Putting together a cutscene is one thing but how do you go from the cutscene back to gameplay? Let’s go over how to set this up.

I have previously gone over how use Timeline and setup cutscenes in these two articles; one and two.

The cutscenes that I have set up have used separate prefabs for the actors which means they need to be enabled for the cutscene and then disabled at the end. An easy way to do this to use the activation track. Add an activation track for the cutscene and drag the game object onto the track. Do the same for the game object that is visible during game play:

Set the gameplay object to get activated during the last frame and the cutscene to be active from start until the last frame:

To start the cutscene a collider is used. Create a script for this collider and attach it to the game object:

Repeat the activation track steps for the Player object and the cutscene collider:

Select the cutscene object and disable Play On Awake. This will prevent game objects to get disable before the cutscene has started:

Open the SleepingGuardTrigger script. Add the using statement UnityEngine.Playables, this will give us access to the PlayableDirector class.
Add two serialized fields, one for the cutscene object and one for a transform which will be used to set the camera position after the cutscene has ended. When the player enters the collider enable Play On Awake and set cutscene as active. When the cutscene has ended and the collider has been disabled set the camera position:

Lastly, drag the cutscene object and the transform for the camera onto the script on the Inspector:

Good Luck!