Complete newb here so I don’t have the vocabulary yet to even search properly for my question!
I have created a landscape scene that I would like to use for the visual in a music video. Imagine the moon and clouds drifting by slowly. The view does not need to change and I don’t need a player in the game. Just a static view.
When I run the scene in the editor, it looks fine, but if I click off the window it gets chunky so I would like to package and export it to a .exe so I can screen record it or stream it in OBS.
My question is, which template (third person, blank, etc) should I choose to begin a project like this and which game mode in the package settings should I use? I have not been able to sucessfully package this to a .exe file without the view angle being completely wrong. Usually shows up under the landscape.
Thanks in advance and I apologize for not being as clear as I would like to be! I’m still learning.
Hello kbdrox, welcome to the Unreal community and thank you for posting.
Beginning with a blank project is a good start if you are trying to keep your project as small as possible. I would consider using a blank project as you can add any starter or the Third Person/First Person packs via the Add Feature or Content Pack menu (when right clicking inside the content browser) later on.
To address the frame rate:
The frame rate generally gets a bit chunky when the engine is not in focus.
Placing a player start in your level will force the blueprint representative of your player to spawn in the desired location. I would also check the setting to ensure you are using the player start and not the camera location.
For the last two years, I’ve been doing this to create custom Zoom backgrounds.
A new background each month, typically based on whatever scene I can find on the marketplace that looks good
So, anyway: the “chunky when in background” is an intentional behavior of the editor; it reduces resource consumption when in the background, to let you work in other resource intensive tools like Maya or Visual Studio.
Whichever template you use doesn’t really matter at all, as you’re going to be creating a new map/level file anyway. I usually use the blank.
To create a scene that’s more or less static camera, the best option I’ve found is to make a handler in “on begin play” in the level blueprint, that calls “Set View Target With Blend” on the output of “Get Player Controller (0)” You should place a camera (typically a CineCamera for that nice exposure/depth-of-field control) in the scene, and pass that in as the actual “view target.”
Make sure you go into project preferences and set the “startup map” to be your actual map.
Then, do “package game for Windows” and choose some output folder. Once it’s done packaging, you can start the EXE, and it will run in release mode, with good FPS. You can use a tool like nVIDIA ShadowPlay to capture the desktop/game while it’s playing back with pretty good quality and no impact on framerate. I do that for 5 minutes, and then take the capture into Premiere to touch up and export a file suitable for my webcam software (XSplit VCam.)
Here’s what the Level Blueprint startup looks like for me:
