Hi,
how can I switch stereoscopic 3D mode during runtime on and off?
(say via an in-game menu interface blueprint triggering the modes)
Not for VR but for 3D monitors / TVs, if there is a difference between VR and conventional stereoscopic.
…also, how would I go about switching between side by side or top / bottom, quad buffered or interlaced?
thanks a lot,
cheers
db
bump…nobody?
this is a real noob question but I can’t find anything in the docs.
I’m trying to test stereoscopic video playback and level rendering in order to get into VR.
Since right now I don’t have a VR headset my 3D TV should be good enough…or so I thought…
When I search for stereoscopic, the only things I get is how to switch monoscopic rendering on for far away objects and stereo layers.
Great…but how do I switch STEREOSCOPIC ON/OFF and how do I switch between sidebyside,overunder etc.???
Do I need to have two cameras present? Do I need to set a boolean somewhere to render two frames at once?
VR is all the craze now but there is nothing about stereoscopics?
VR is useless if your HMD won’t display stereoscopic images.
Or do I need to fake an HMD in order to turn stereoscopic on? but then it is for headsets not for regular, plain “old” stereoscopic monitors / TV’s, or is it ?
sorry for the tl;dr but I must be missing something very basic and I’m getting no help from the documentation…or not looking in the right place…
somebody please help, thanks!
I think a lot of this comes down to the limitations of real-time rendering and the adoption of VR versus something like 3D TVs. While you can leverage the engine to create your own stereoscopic renderer, I think VR is supported by default (with all of the hard stuff under the hood) because there is more content being created for VR than real-time content for 3DTVs, and VR as a platform is lest costly than full-res stereo renders.
To get started, a good way to preview exactly what is being rendered in a VR scene is to use the Spectator Screen. There is a node called “Set Spectator Screen Mode” that you can drop in EventBeginPlay and set to “Undistorted” mode. This will display to your monitor screen exactly what is being sent to a VR headset.
While in VR mode, your pawn camera is rendering the scene twice (to get the perspective of your left and right eye) and composites these two views. By default, this would halve your performance and you would take a huge hit to frame-rate. Luckily, the dev team included features to help lighten the load (culling the screen where pixels are not visible to an HMD (the black area around each eye), rendering objects only once if they’re far away etc).
In VR the aspect ratio is also much different than a TV/Monitor. This one 16:9 frame contains the info for both eyes, versus a typical stereo render which is either two 16:9 renders stacked over/under or side/side, or more often, a composite packaged render that your TV understands. Rendering your scene twice for every frame at a decent resolution for a TV would likely be really difficult to play at any decent frame-rate.
If you’re only trying to preview something for VR on your 3D TV, maybe you could rig the Undistorted spectator screen to something usable by your system. Otherwise, I think you would probably need to rig up your own system using some combination of cameras, SceneCapture 2Ds, and UMG or Slate.
