I Built My Own Unity Camera Tool - Cinematic Moves Without Keyframes

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It’s been two months since my last post - I’ve been working on three projects in the meantime. One of them: my own camera tool for Unity, built with the help of Claude Code. :clapper_board:

It started very unspectacularly: I routinely record showcase footage of my props, and the usual Unity route - Timeline, keyframes, curves, configuring the Recorder - slowed me down every single time. At some point I thought: why not just build yourself a little tool for that? Well… it naturally kept growing - with every test, more and more features found their way in. That “little tool” turned into “CineShot Setup”:

:black_small_square: Click a camera and dial in the move with sliders - orbit, crane, dolly, pan, roll, dolly zoom (vertigo). Framing couples directly to the Scene view, and the tool auto-detects the mesh you’re aiming at to set the pivot point for orbits & co. Not a single keyframe.
:black_small_square: Every setup is stored as a key on a mini timeline: drag durations, one-click easing (Smooth/Linear/Slow/Fast), live scrubbing right inside the key graph.
:black_small_square: Handheld shake per key - full length or just at the start/end, with a preview button.
:black_small_square: Chain multiple cameras into a sequence: cuts, blends, fade-to-black, music stays in sync and ends up in the video.
:black_small_square: One click on :record_button: Record: the tool bakes everything, enters Play Mode and renders a finished MP4 through the Unity Recorder (using your own Recorder settings).
:black_small_square: Everything exports as plain AnimationClips - so the moves also work in a build, e.g. for in-game cutscenes.

To be clear: this is deliberately NOT a full video editor. Cutting, titles and polish still happen in my video editor afterwards - the tool reliably delivers the raw material: the camera moves. Perfect for asset showcases, store trailers and devlog footage.

I built it for my own needs. If there’s interest from the community, I’ll happily release it.

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That would seem very useful to people, especially artists. But do check the store. I know there’s several such camera tools for making cinematic sequences and to take screenshots or recordings. At the very least it’ll suggest how to price this, how to market it, or whether it’s even worth publishing if the competition seems fierce.

If your asset is streamlined version of some other asset with way more features, don’t fret. There’s plenty of devs who value tools that do exactly what they need with little setup/friction.

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First and foremost I built it to make my own showcase videos easier - that was the whole idea behind it. I know there are plenty of similar tools out there, but I wanted one tailored exactly to my workflow. Every feature in it exists because I actually needed it while shooting a video, not because it looked good on a feature list.

While extending it I realized it might be useful for others too, so I did some research - and at least I couldn’t find anything that’s slider-based like this. Everything I came across still has you working with keyframes, curves or waypoints at some point.

That’s also why I’ve tried to keep it from getting too complex - partly with a possible release in the back of my mind.