As I have stated to many people and in my silly, little 30 Day video, I’m interested in Unreal as a rendering solution. So far, it’s been great learning the inside for everything else it offers, but outputting a stream of stills to be brought into post and tweaked, is another story. I had been told by someone, and perhaps misinformed, that UE can output EXR files, which it can. I’ve done it.
The problem is that they are simply screen grabs. Matinee will export a stream of stills (and it looked poor, even uncompressed,) but not EXRs, so I’m looking for a way to marry the HSSRT and Matinee tools, ultimately, get quality output at a specified frame rate, whether or not those tools are used.
This got me to thinking about the Kite demo. It’s incredibly clean. I know it ran in realtime on a beast of a machine, but I’m sure they had a way to output everything better than what Matinee offers. Can someone suggest a solution? Without boring you with the details, there are other reasons for the EXR files, as they will allow me incredible flexibility in composting, which my project requires. Just think of one UE scene inside another.
Truth be told, if I can’t find a good solution, then I might have to jump off the UE bandwagon for my current project which is to release a 3-4 minuted animated series every week, starting next year. No fault of UE if this can’t be done, just the reality of the situation. The upside for me is that my materials are Substances and the geo and animation is all done in Max, so the worst case for me is moving to iRay and beefing up my render farm.
You will want to check out Sequencer when it is released in the 4.10 version. It will be experimental in 4.10, but it has a much more robust editing component and the ability to output based on frame rate. EXR is still coming to Sequencer, but it will be coming soon.
Well, blow me down! There may be light at the end of the tunnel. I’ve stayed away from 4.10 because when I bumped to 4.9.2, I started getting crashes, and everything had been stable before. Somehow I never learn to steer clear of the bleeding edge. I’m trying with the beta of 4.10.
The bottom line is that if I have a solution by late December, then I’m comfortable with that.
Of course, I have no idea how this “sequencer” is going to work, but I’ll make the assumption that it will serve my needs. Any light on that would be appreciated.
BTW, it would be hugely useful to be able to choose where the files are saved instead of being forced to go into the default folder in the project’s path. For instance, my projects are in the cloud, but I don’t need my frames going there.
I only now found your post here, SterlingY. Could have saved me so much time.
Alternative to the sequencer would be the matinee and the movie function within the matinee.
It is a much easier solution than I thought I would find.
I’ve heard from a friend of mine who works at Epic in the blueprint department that there is supposed to be a plugin to enable taking HighResShots in exr format via console which I didn’t find and couldn’t find any documentation about.
I’ve read about altering the code but even if I did that I would still not know how to make the engine take screenshots in the right format.
As someone told me it would work that way I tried getting into the sequencer but…stopped, because
Now after 2 days of research I found the simplest solution. In the Matinee. Clicking on the Movie icon in the top right corner you can choose “Custom Render Passes”. Now a bit further down in the options you can check the box for “HDR” which will produce EXRs for every frame. You can add all the tracks you want or need in another drop down menu.
I must say I feel a bit dumb, posting in years old threads and questions in the forum and the answer hub to find the sultion to be that simple.
I hope, even though it comes late, that this is helpfull to you.