What content would you like to see on the learning portal?

[anonymous_user_8756ea37]

@Greg.Corson

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By basics, I mean start with something simple like building a video/cg composite with a stationary live camera and some CG that animates. Show how to do it with a webcam or inexpensive video capture device instead of a $900 pro card so anyone can try it. Show how to record it with OBS. Then move on into chroma-key and putting a VIVE tracker on the video camera and matching it up with the CG. Then step-by-step add more advanced stuff like shadow catchers, matching the CG lighting with the live, setting up the camera to fix lens distortion, using pro cards/cameras and so on.

If you’re an Unreal expert, this may seem like obvious stuff, but even following the docs you have up already, I’ve hit a lot of little “stoppers” that are probably simple things. When looking for solutions I’ve seen a lot of people asking the same questions as me…some examples.

• Initially I had some trouble getting the vive tracker attached to a camera or other CG object so it would come up and be active when I started the game.
• Right now when I run my project in the editor it works, but when I run it as a standalone the trackers stop working.
• Initially a pawn->motion controller->camera object wouldn’t work with composure, I had to make one tracked pawn with a blueprint that copied it’s transform to a separate camera object
• For some reason, both the live video and CG in my composites seem a bit fuzzy right now.
• Sometimes the video feed or the trackers stop working, I’m assuming the way I’m setting them up isn’t quite right so that they will always be recognized.
• Getting things setup so comp & tracked camera work and I can also control the character on the screen with the keyboard has also been a problem.
• Trying to record the results using OBS, I have had many issues where, instead of getting the CG window I see unreal editor tooltip pop-ups in OBS instead.

Like I say, a lot of these are probably issues because I’m still fairly new to Unreal, but a lot of people doing Virtual Production are going to be new to Unreal too…they need a kickstart that doesn’t assume too much Unreal knowledge to get going. And something that adds features one step at a time is always better than starting with a big monolithic example. In fact, a learning series for Virtual Production might start with an “introduction to unreal” chapter focused on the basics a new user wanting to do Virtual Production needs to know.

The current composure and virtual studio samples on the marketplace are nice, but both are pretty complicated which makes them hard to learn from. The Virtual Studio one is a complex CG setup where it’s harder to see what is happening (also it requires pro capture cards to properly use) and it doesn’t use Composure. The Composure sample is very nice but also very involved, so if you are trying to learn the basics it’s a bit like skipping right to chapter 13 of a textbook.

I’ve already posted some of the test work I’ve done, but I’m not sure that I’m really doing some stuff “the right way” because it doesn’t work right all the time. So right now my stuff may not be the best examples, I’m trying to improve them.

I could see a lot of YouTubers using Unreal to produce fun videos, but they need some better docs and basic template projects to help them get started.

My current experiments (nothing to brag about yet) are here https://www.youtube.com/user/GregCorson and include a link to the Unreal project so you can see how I am doing it (probably wrong

Greg

This is great input. I’ll take this to the team and see how this aligns with what we are already making.

Thanks,