Mods useful for machinima filmmakers?

[vger]

I'm looking for anything that will allow for good machinima creation. Things like the ability to record a mission and then play it back while observing from a different "camera." A "zoom" camera to grab footage of a blastoff as if viewed from the planet surface, like the kind of shots we see in live coverage of a rocket launch. A way to ride "shotgun" near a vessel as it executes maneuvers, staying relative to its movement but still allowing slow pans past it? Any utility that could aid in making cinematic scenes with no trace of the UI. Have things like this been done?

[LitaAlto]

There isn't really anything like that.

Most of us use a tool like KerbCam or Camera Tools for the camera angles, and leverage quicksaves so we can reshoot scenes until we have all the footage we need.

Camera Tools is my favorite, as you can set a static location for the camera, which is good for ground camera shots, or have it move with the craft. You can also set autozoom, set relative velocity for those "shotgun" slow pans you mention, and use the numpad to manually control the camera in any mode. It also has a "dogfight" mode which is really handy not just for dogfights but for docking maneuvers, EVAs, and any scene where there's at least two craft. And it has a camera pathing tool, which is handy but not as flexible as the pathing in KerbCam.

The mod is abandoned and hasn't been updated in a while, but seems to work fine in every version of KSP since.
 

KerbCam mainly focuses on pathing, and has been kept more up-to-date by volunteers, and if you like the control of pathing, this might be a better option:

https://github.com/cartman09/kerbcam

And for my cinematics, I sometimes create a tiny probe with RCS and a few choice cameras from Hullcam VDS -- or even EVA a Kerbal and use the same mod for a Kerbal-view shot.
 

I hope this helps!

[DoctorDavinci]

43 minutes ago, LitaAlto said:

The mod is abandoned and hasn't been updated in a while, but seems to work fine in every version of KSP since.

FYI .... Camera Tools has been kept up to date since the BDAc team was formed over 2 years ago 

 

[LitaAlto]

1 minute ago, DoctorDavinci said:

FYI .... Camera Tools has been kept up to date since the BDAc team was formed over 2 years ago 

 

OOH. Thank you for letting me know! Somehow I missed that.

[DoctorDavinci]

4 minutes ago, LitaAlto said:

OOH. Thank you for letting me know! Somehow I missed that.

It's actually maintained by one of the teams code guru's @jrodriguez ... check the bdac family mod list spoiler in the first post, the links to his repo are there and I believe ther is a thread, I forget