I was looking for a good 360 video exporter, for monoscopic and stereoscopic image.
I test the Kite and Lightning plugins > the post processing don’t works and the render are very long.
With Ansel, you can get the post processing ! and the render seems not longer. And you can get a very high resolution. But Ansel works only for screenshots.
I’m also waiting for a better way to render 360 Videos with unreal. The best thing i found so far is the Kite and Lighting Stereo Panoramic Plugin, the postprocessing works for me but its very slow. I hope the anounced Ansel SDK will make it possible for me to develop a better 360 video rendering
Stereo Pano still has some issues that the Ansel 360 stereo capture seems to solve.
-The built in capture can’t seem to render planar reflections (If I’m not mistaken the Hellblade 360 video only had SS reflections). Ansel does.
-Stereo of very close objects is usually broken (understandable, but doesn’t seem to be nearly as bad with Ansel).
-Because of how the multiple 360 screenshots are taken, the glow/bloom of objects can be abruptly cut off (doesn’t happen with sparks, but will happen for something that is larger on-screen, like the moon).
-There are some concentrical ‘sector’ lines still visible even if the vignette effects are disabled from the PP volume (this one is not a dealbreaker though).
The only graphical drawback (if we can call it that) with Ansel is that it makes everything much, much sharper than what we see with TXAA, but that can probably be tweaked.
Considering how fast Ansel seems to be (A 4K 360 screenshot took 79 seconds with the Stereo Pano Plugin, and the same 4K screenshot took 21 seconds with Ansel), it would be great to at least have an option to capture video with it. Not sure if this is something that would need to be included in Unreal or added to Ansel itself. But it would be very useful indeed.
We did a 6-camera rig for a video-output of a recent VR piece “Coral & I”. Just make a cubic arrangement of cameras with a 90 degree field of view and stitch it together in your preferred compositing package.
It meant all the Post Processing work as expected. That was a huge positive, but the negatives were the non-repeatable dynamics like the particle fish and the seaweed.
It’s not a solution, but it got the piece to Cannes Film Festival with the promise that a proper, real time version would follow but that’s beside the point.
I hope we can get a good solution soon. Even the Ansel code is 2D 360 (I think?) which get’s us half way there!
Beautiful work, Renbry. The 6 camera rig is a good temporal solution, but we are trying to get an accurate video version of a real time experience and the native Unreal solution still has some weakness. Ansel can render 360 stereo very well, but we haven’t found the way to automatize the process.
The seaweed looks great and the stitching problems are barely noticeable.
For the fish, you could always make sure all the particle systems have very large bounds and their location modules etc are seeded. It won’t solve shader-based randomness, but helps with most of the other problems.
I have tried the Stereo Pano Plugin also and can’t get anything usable out of it. Went through the great tutorials by Sam but there is always some kind of horizontal banding lines regardless of how many of the SP. commands I adjust. The program kind of reminds me of Mental Ray. Great for its time when there was really nothing else like it but eventually went the way of the dodo due to all the set up involved to get a simple decent image out of it.
Ansel is spitting out a 4k stereoscopic image sequence for me and the quality looks great. Just not sure if it’s actually capturing a frame at 30 fps. If we force Unreal to 30 fps with the console command (t.MaxFPS 30) then it sounds like there should be an easy way to advance the game one tick then pause it, run Ansel, advance the game another tick then pause it, run Ansel and so on…
If the game is locked to 30 FPS, will advancing the game by one tick advance the game exactly one frame? If so how do we advance it only one tick before pausing it?
The only other options I know of are the Facebook 360 video sdk and I think the Nvidia Vr Works sdk may have something for spitting out an image sequence but I can’t find any tutorials on either one of those
Just bumping here in.
I am also trying to get a 360 video out of Unreal. I tried a workaround with a scene capture cube and sequencer.
But my problem is that I am also using videos in my scene so there are some more problems.
My current renderings show some artifacts at the edges of the scene capture cube with shadows showing at one part and are then cut away completley on the other.
Maybe this would help you guys to solve your plreblems and maybe someone has an idea how to fix the capture cube.
