Fulldome and a few other questions...

[Skarekrow73]

Hi everyone,

I’m a relative novice at using Unreal 4, and have just been doing tutorials online to teach myself the basics. I’m fairly well-versed in Maya (nothing amazing though) so my understanding of 3D is somewhat there. Basically, for my final semester project at Uni I’m making a video that will be played on the Fulldome planetarium in my city. I’ve seen methods of getting a fulldome (180x360 degree) camera working in Maya and Unity, but not Unreal.

This thread is the best set of information I’ve found in regard to achieving this. Basically, the normal camera doesn’t cut it and 180 degree FOV isn’t correct for this use. There is an explanation in the thread but it’s a little beyond me as to how to achieve it, so I was wondering if anyone could decode and explain how to achieve the effect they’re talking about when they say

Paul Bourke’s approach in Unity was to create a cubemap with multiple cameras - something you should be able to do in UE4 with a Cubemap Camera (fairly sure that’s a thing - at the least there’s a TextureRenderTargetCube class in Source/Runtime/Engine/Private/TextureRenderTargetCube.cpp). From there, you could do the same thing of projecting that cubemap onto a mesh with the appropriate distortion, and point an orthographic camera at that mesh. The ortho camera should then give you the right fisheye for the projection.

I understand somewhat what is happening to achieve this, but I have no idea how to do it.

My other main queries are that I don’t know heaps about materials and how people use the math to create the effects they want - I watched this and followed it, and it kind of made sense but I had no idea about this guy’s thought process:
Link

I want to achieve stuff like this: Link
But at the moment all I’ve managed is to get some glowing spheres and make them kind of look like stars - I need to figure out how to achieve limb darkening (where the edges of the star are darker than the center no matter the perspective) and how to get them to appear to pulse and glow dynamically more than just being a static ball of light. And unfortunately there is no decent tutorial for anything close to what this guy did.

Here are some images (Link 1 Link 2) of what I’ve done, it’s nothing spectacular, just a couple nodes and a few spheres.

Anyway, thanks for reading if you got this far - I hope this post isn’t annoyingly long and convoluted, I don’t post on forums much but I’m at a loss and my tutor doesn’t know much about Unreal. I figured I’d just lay everything out in one post instead of asking a simple question and spending hours clarifying what I mean.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

[patlj09]

Hi Skarekrow73, did you ever resolve the full dome rendering setup? I’m scouting for a six projector, six node rendering setup and configuration for UE4 as well.