What is the easiest and most straight forward way to export 360 stereoscopic panorama footage from UE4??
I have seen a few methods that seem to be over a year old and perhaps outdated / complex?
Cheers for any help in advance.
This is the most comprehensive break down of what you need to do for your stereo pano exports.
This is ridiculously not easy.
At the time this was the best option for rendering 360 panos. In 4.24 I believe there is a more advanced omnidirection stereo pano export option however I have found that the Camera360 plugin on the marketplace Camera 360 in Blueprints - UE Marketplace is actually the easiest way to get these images out. It’s a bit expensive as a blueprint plugin, but if you are in the business of using Unreal to render stereo panos, it’s worth the price.
The blog post is really intimidating but the plugin is actually much easier to use than that may lead you to believe, I suggest following the livestream that covered the plugin.
The biggest issue I had with this approach was I had no idea what to do with the C++ code, so I couldn’t render both eyes to a single image. My solution was to just merge them afterward using a simple python + pillow script that ran through all the images in the directory.
But if you want another solution, here is one. It’s very old though, can’t guarantee it still works. It also only takes 4 (6?) slices which means you’re going to get very noticeable seam artifacts in the stereoscopy. The plugin that ships with UE4 doesn’t have this problem because it lets you specify the number of slice steps to take. This makes it pretty slow, but you get the best stereoscopy possible.
Could you elaborate on this? Where’d you read this?
My apologies, it was actually in 4.23 as documented here:
I believe it is similar to the previous methods which have been highlighted in this thread. The first posts with the C++ aspects were the first iteration of the stereo capture plugin and the biggest problem with that method was the time/memory that it took to capture a single frame.
The other method available capturing stereopanos is with Nvidia Ansel plugin which is faster for capturing but requires using other tools outside of unreal to work properly and even then require a great deal of testing to get to work properly: Hacking NVIDIA Ansel to Slash VR Rendering Times | NVIDIA Technical Blog
After extensively using all 3 methods (Ansel, UE4 stereo capture and the Camera 360 plugin), I can safely say that the Camera 360 plugin on the marketplace is the fastest way to capture panoramic sequences. You can even do ray tracing which is not yet supported in the official plugin. It is several orders of magnitude faster at rendering frames (I can export 10k+ frame sequences in a couple hours vs days for Ansel) and you have a lot of different options available. On top of that, the developer of the plugin, ElizzaRF, is very helpful and responsive if you run into any issues. Again, I know it’s a bit pricey but if you are doing work that requires rendering 360 stereo video, it is worth the price.
Fastest I’m sure, but the product page says the effect is reversed when looking 180º. I don’t own it, but this is a classic problem of using single captures for each eye (which is why the stereopano plugin takes many captures). That’s fine for a lot of content (afaik this is how the vast majority of live action VR is shot) but I would not consider that a real solution for full 360 stereo.
Good afternoon!
I am the author of codes and plugins, including Camera 360.
In the current version of Camera 360, the 360 stereo mode works but is not correct.
-Stereo 360-when rotated, stereoscopy effect is lost, if rotated 180 degrees the image looks inverted.It seems the Left eye and right are swapped, as this is a recorded video.
I found a solution to this problem and work on this fix every day but as it turned out, it takes longer than I expected.
Example image 360 stereo.
I think I will soon be able to release an update that will capture the correct stereo.
When I have news about the update, I will definitely publish the video on the plugin channel Youtube chanel , as well as the channel where I publish 360 video renderings.
Thanks to everyone who purchased the plugin and you use it in your projects.