Helios 3D-360 Video

Absolutly,
Under the prefabs folder there are a set of Rigs.
Use the Helios 2D rig for that

 

Magical!

I am trying to build my exe standalone version to run, but getting the following errors, preventing it from building:

Assets/UtopiaWorx/Helios/scripts/ScreenData/ScreenData.cs(9,34): error CS0234: The type or namespace name `Helios' does not exist in the namespace `UtopiaWorx.Helios'. Are you missing an assembly reference?
Assets/UtopiaWorx/Helios/scripts/ScreenData/ScreenData.cs(10,34): error CS0234: The type or namespace name `Helios2D' does not exist in the namespace `UtopiaWorx.Helios'. Are you missing an assembly reference?
Error building Player because scripts had compiler errors

The ScreenData.cs is definitely there in the correct folder

 

Heya,
I have Helios setup to not compile for builds, as it's an editor only tool.
It seems that you still have the Diagnostics prefab attached to your scene when you are trying to build.
I have updated that script so that it's an editor only tool.
Can you send me a PM with your email address and order number and I will give you access to the latest build with that patch.

Thanks,
John

 

I just submitted 1.0.7.B to fix the issue with compiling projects that contain Helios

 

Hi John. Can Helios capture spatial audio? Thanks, John

 

I looked into this a while back and found I would have to write my own spatial audio plugin and make it work cross platform. So, sadly at this point, no it does not have direct support for it.

 

Thanks John. I presume it would be possible to capture it via other means and then mix it in an offline situation.

 

Heya,
Yes, actually, the tools integrated with Helios include the YouTube 360 MetaData injector. It has an option for you to specify that your audio track is spatial as well. So once you have made your video content, you can use :
Another tool like Premier
Helios itself and just specify the audio track you want to use

Then when you are ready to publish the videos, you just tell the spatial metadata injetor that you are using spatial audio as well as spherical video format.

Long story short, if you can feed spatial audio data into the default audio listener its a non issue.
I'm just not making a spatial audio plugin. So if you want to use another one of your liking, it will work.

Thanks,
john

 

I want to congratulate Adam Goodrich for releasing Pegasus on the Asset Store.
If you have already purchased Helios, I urge you to take a look at Pegasus. It's the perfect counterpart for creating ultra smooth camera movements. Adam and I actually worked together in the development of both of our products to integrate them together tightly.



Capture by Helios, Movement by Pegasus!

Pegasus Tutorial

 

Some important updated in the pipeline for Helios.
Version 1.0.8 has been submitted, and Version 1.0.9 is in development.
Here is the lowdown:

Version 1.0.8 : Update (Submitted Sep-5-2016)
-Extended API for integration with other assets (read Pegasus)
-Added optional grain support to shader to help reduce sky banding
-Added a new fade to black option for Helios
-Addd support for Additive scenes and letting Helios continue between scene loading.
-Added Chroma Key Output Option

Version 1.0.9 : Update (Waiting final QC)
-Added native iOS recording resolutions (iPad, iPhone5, iPhone6)
-Added support for EXR file format
-Added hardware detection warnings
-Added diagnostic window
-Fixed a bug in the audio recording tool

 

Hi,

I'm have a huge problem; i first install Helios (1.0.8) Unity 5.4.1f1 and I get this :
Assets/UtopiaWorx/Helios/scripts/Utility/HeliosUtility.cs(21,41): error CS0118: `UtopiaWorx.Helios' is a `namespace' but a `type' was expected

when building; how to fix this please ?

Thanks

 

Hi there,

Sorry to hear about your issue.

Can you tell me what platform you are trying to compile for?

Also, I have a realtime Skype chat channel for support at: https://join.skype.com/Cb69olXJbDTo

 

Actually, scratch that. I see the issue.
Sorry about that, I have a quick fix for you on this.
If you can open that file: Assets/UtopiaWorx/Helios/scripts/Utility/HeliosUtility.cs
At the top of the file, right after #define HELIOS, can you please add:
#if UNITY_EDITOR

and then at the very bottom please add:
#endif

This is happening because this utility script is trying to compile into your main application, and it is an editor script.
I will make this change to the next version of Helios to be submitted as well.

Sorry for the trouble.

Thanks,
John

 

I just bought Helios and I doing the first testing with Pegasus. After adding the the Helios Pegasus prefab to scene, attaching that to Pegasus, and hitting play I somehow lose the control of my mouse and I can't stop the play mode. All I can do is to kill Unity completely. Has there been anybody else experiencing this same problem?

 

Hey there!

Thanks for your purchase of Helios!

So to answer your question, there is a setting in the "Session Controller" component called "Cursor Lock".
You can change that value here to specify how you want the cursor to behave.

In addition to that, you can alway use the Command + P (Mac) or Control + P (Windows) key combinations to start and stop your scenes in Unity.

Also, if you use skype, please join my live support group here: https://join.skype.com/Cb69olXJbDTo

Thanks,
John

 

Just bought this and its great!
Having an issue I'm hoping you can help me with -
For the most part it works great but in a few sections of capture, every third frame glitches and comes out like this:

When it should look like this:



I though it was maybe a LOD issue but nothing has worked. Any ideas?

Thanks!

 

Hi, Thanks for the purchase!

Sorry to see you are having issues.

It looks like you have something that interfering in the frame buffer.
There is going to be something in your scene that is doing this, from a water system or a sky system which forces forward rendering.

I have also seen similar looking things happen for people who are using a reflection script.

try disabling things in the scene and capturing a few frames at a time, and it should identify itself quickly.
Please let me know once you identify the component.

Thanks,
john

 

Hey,

I've been playing with Helios for a bit and unless I missed something I'm guessing that using post effects on camera is not really viable for 360?

I did put the scripts on the stitcher and before the stitching script however some seem to be outright ignored (screen space reflections) while others are not used correctly (bloom).

This is roughly what I see in Unity on game screen:


And this is what comes out:


Did I miss something somewhere or is this perhaps even unity limitation on the way it does the cubemaps?

 

Heya,

Thanks for purchasing Helios!

No it should work fine with most post processing effects.
There are some exceptions in which those effect force themselves into strange render modes and don't write to the frame buffer as you would expect. I have seen issues with Unity's SSR too, but I don't really have any answer as to why.

How about you join me on my skype support group and we can take a look?

https://join.skype.com/Cb69olXJbDTo

Thanks,
John

 

Hey, so I've been trying to use Helios + Pegasus for some fly-by 360 videos, but whenever I upload them to youtube they either look either really pixelated or jittery. I've tried the 30/60fps combinations with HD/DVD/Youtube resolutions but for whatever reason can't get them to run smoothly like in your demo videos. What are the recommended settings for exporting to youtube?

Also, Unity Editor (5.4.2p1) crashes around 50% of the time when trying to export to the DVD format on a Windows PC (i7-6700k/32ram/2vram). Is it a bug or do I need higher specs to run Helios?

 

Thanks for purchasing Helios!

The mysteries of getting things to encode in YouTube are vast
You have to keep in mind that when you upload a video to YouTube, they will take that video and then run it through their own encoders to compress it. So I guess it really depends on what you are trying to upload.

Other Helios users put a lot of time and energy into researching this and concluded that things like fast moving foliage just do not encode very well when compressed.

Which GPU do you have?

 

Thanks for the quick reply,

Initially I've been trying to upload a 60fps/DVD resolution mp4 generated by Helios and the results were far from optimal. However, after rendering the video from the same images in After Effects (with Youtube recommended settings) the overall quality increased substantially so I'm guessing your encoder settings are a bit off. Either way, it's not an issue since I edit the videos in AE before uploading them anyway, but you should probably add a youtube-friendly encoder setting as an option for users without video editing software on hand.

As for my GPU, it's a pretty crappy GTX 960a, so it definitely can't handle realtime 4K rendering but I thought it would be more than enough for offline rendering, yet Unity keeps randomly crashing while trying to render a 30 second DVD resolution clip in 360.

 

I'm sorry to hear about Unity crashing on you. This is a very memory intensive operation (converting frame buffer data to an actual image file format) and not really what Unity was intended for. However, I have heard from a few other users that it has crashed on them as well. I will be looking over the code this week to see if I can optimize it any further.

In regard to the built in encoder, well thats FFMPEG, and if you have the luxury of AE or Premier Pro, you can simply use those instead, I offered FFMPEG support to lower the barrier of entry for Helios.

Thanks,
J

 

Howdy, John--

I'm getting good use out of Helios so far (I'll post a review soon) -- nice results with the 2D recorder, though the save-session process took a little bit of getting used to.

My previous workflow involved using "Action" to capture the Unity output window, along with Scene View FX. It was a huge hassle to get it set up right, and of course it was limited to real-time output from the editor's game-preview tab. Any glitch or stutter in Unity's preview/play session was of course caught by Action. Its video also appeared to be lower-quality (and certainly less versatile/editable) because it's capturing video rather than EXR images. A huge improvement in both quality and ease-of-use!

I do have one major gripe with Helios -- but it should be very easy to address: Helios automatically saves my scene file whenever I run the tool -- whether for preview, session-recording, or capture. This is a *big* problem for me, because I'm very particular about when I save my scenes. Unity's undo function isn't reliable with certain plugins and scripts, so I occasionally need to revert to the previous save. Having Helios overwrite my latest manual save each time I play the scene has caused some major headaches. I've gotten around it by saving two copies of each scene while I'm working with Helios (so it only overwrites one copy), but could you provide an option to switch off auto-saving of the scene? If saving is necessary for some reason, perhaps you could simply designate Helios's save by adding "_temp" to the scene name?

There are a couple of quirks that you might want to mention to folks if it's not already in the latest documentation. One is the fact that (from what I can see, at least) the gamma boost is apparently essential for folks using deferred rendering. I'm doing a full indoor architectural fly through, and the screen is virtually black until I turn gamma-boost on. Your docs mention that it can compensate for linear/gamma modes, but I didn't realize how essential it was until I tried rendering without it!

The other quirk I ran into involves the session recorder. I'm using the Camera-Path asset (I bought Pegasus but it's too basic for what I need). I found that Helios will follow the Camera-Path waypoints just fine, but it's essential to "Clear Session Data" whenever I create/use a new path. If I don't, the camera will either stop early or else resume the old path at the end of the new one (depending on whether the new one is longer or shorter than the obsolete/undeleted session data). Not a problem, but perhaps something to warn users about..

Thanks for a great product!

 

Hey there,

I'm glad that you are liking Helios

As for your big gripe, luckily this is easy to fix. There is a file in the "Helios/Scripts/AutoSave/Editor/" folder called AutoSave.cs. You can just delete that file.

The other quirks you mention, yes the documentation should be updated to make those more clear to new users.

Thanks for the purchase and Im very happy to hear that you are liking it.

John

 

Is it possible to change the FOV on 3D/360 videos? It seems changing the FOV on the Helios cameras has no effect on the rendered video. Not sure if this is a limitation of the tool or of 360 rendering.

 

Hi there!
Thanks for your purchase of Helios!

No, you would not need to change the FOV, as it is a perfectly full FOV already.
360 rendering is a full FOV.

I hope that helps you.

Thanks,
John

 

Hi
Is there an 8k resolution limit for offline 360 degree stereoscopic capture? Do you think 16k might work?
Happy for the system to spend time on each frame and save as a png image sequence.
Are left/right eye views on top of each other in one image? In this case the aspic ratio is 1:1, correct?
Thanks, Volker

 

Thanks for writing
While 16K i theoretically possible, the amount of VRAM needed to perform the operation in Stereo 360 just does not exist yet. I tried on my 1070 and Unity just does not seem to want to let it happen.

As far as stereo top and bottom, it matches the specs set forth by players like YouTube and the likes, where the aspect ratio is doubled in height for the ability to have 2 images in one single file.

I hope this answers your questions.

 

Thanks John

 

Okay, the full FOV thing makes sense, but is it possible to have any kind of zoom? Right now there are some "hero" elements in my shot that look fine in the game, using a FOV of 30, but are really small in the 360 video. I could move things around to change the actual distance between the camera and geometry, but I'd like to avoid messing with the scene as much as possible.

 

Sorry, no, things like Zoom would not apply in a 360 field of view.

 

I also got Helios 3D, but can't figure out how it integrates with Pegasus flythrough camera editor asset.
I would like Helios to render a scene in high resolution and 360 degree for VR playback. Can't do in real-time, so each frame (saved as an image) takes time to render and save to disk. How can I get a Pegasus fly-through camera to trigger the frame rendering, wait for the frame to finish rendering, and then move on to the next camera position?

 

If I recall, there should be settings inside of Pegasus to tell it where in the path to record with Helios.
You need to be sure to use the Pegasus Prefabs installed in Helios though to make sure that the built in camera animation system is disabled.

Cheers!

 

Helios is awesome! Any tips for reducing flicker on shadows?

 

Hi! I'm having a bit of a problem when recording audio. You see, when I preview the recorded audio in the Sessions folder, it appears as if it's slowed down. This also happens when I render the video. Did I miss some necessary configuration so that the recorded audio is not slowed down?

I'm attaching the diagnostics from the inspector in my project.
Thanks! Awesome product btw.

 

I have seen this happen in the past when more than one audio listener is enabled at the time of playback and recording.
Can you double check that you only have the Audio Listener on the Helios Camera running?

Thanks,
john

 

Hey, thanks for your quick response. This also happens in the demo scene, so I'm sure there is only one audio listener and it is that of the Helios Camera.

Thanks,
Felipe

 

there should be 2 files in the sessions folder. one of them will be a .raw file and one will be a .wav file.
Try to listen to the wave file in an external audio program and see how it sounds.

Also, what framerate are you setting Helios to work at?
Did you change the frame rate between your recording session and playback?

 

Also, have you by chance played with your Time Settings by chance?

 

HI ,I using demo scene with some maybe stupid problem ,
after record and insert youtube metadata using tinker tool provide with helios, this video i made still can not been recognized as 3d format,like this:

FYI: when I use the tools named "GoPro VR Player 2.0" to view file locally it looks like this :

version :


help

 

Thanks for your purchase of Helios!

It can take YouTube a long time to process the 360 video data.
I have seen it take 24 hours for large files in high (4K) resolution, so the best bet here is patience.
Also, if when you uploaded your video to YouTube, please make sure you DID NOT touch the 3D video settings options in the upload manager, as those are reserved for stereographic 3D and will cause your video to not properly encode on their end.

I'm not sure why it is doing that on the GoPro software, I personally use KolorEyes which was recently bought by them.

Check back on YouTube in some hours and then ping me back.

Good Luck!

John

 

HI John,tks for reply.yes, U are right about YouTube processing time now it works .
for local viewing the KolorEyes still can not play the local mp4 i made,so i google a new software link:http://www.utovr.com/player/desktop and every thing works fine

 

Sweet!

Well glad that all worked out for you!

 

Hi John, I haven't edited the Time settings, nor have I modified the frame rate between session recording and video capture. The audio is also slowed down while playing on an external player.

I have also made this test on a blank project with the Helios 3D prefab, a single audio source with Unity 5.4.2p2, 5.3.5 and 5.5.0. They all produce the same result described above.

Thanks,
Felipe

 

Thanks for the info!
Can you tell me about your Audio Device?

 

Sure, it's Realtek High Definition Audio.

 

Actually, would you mind joining my realtime Skype support channel at: https://join.skype.com/Cb69olXJbDTo
That way we can talk about it realtime, and screen share to figure it out.

Thanks,
John

 

Hey everyone - released a new version of Pegasus today with stacks of new features!

For those of you that don't know, Helios and Pegasus are allied products, and John and I worked together to ensure that they are nicely integrated. If you check the first two video's on the Pegasus asset, these were created by using Pegasus and Helios together.

Being the lazy type that I am, my aim is to generate video output with little to no need to post edit, so the latest version of Pegasus has better integration with Helios, an ability to chain Pegasus together to allow different camera angles to be stitched together to tell a story, and a special trigger component to join these with dips to black (or your color of choice).

Here is a video of the latest version. It gives you a sense of how quick and easy it is to generate your cut-scenes and fly-throughs.. the last step would just be to plug in Helios.

I will do a video tutorial on that last step tomorrow

 

Great Job Adam,
This update is massive in terms of functionality of Pegasus!
I love the camera banking man, been wanting to see that for a while.
Obviously, the Helios integrations look fantastic