Helios 3D-360 Video

How to bypass G-Drive Virus alert!

Simply download G-drive app for Win/Mac and you can drag the file out once sync'd to your computer.

 

Ok post this problem 10 days ago and also posted for the official support. No answer.
I'm dumb and this is a stupid problem I'm asking for help, or I purchased a dead asset.

 

Hi There,

Sorry, as typical Unity had stopped sending me notifications from the forum post.
I promise you that the asset is still quite alive and kicking, I just released a new version the other day.

I generally advise people to join up on my Skype group for realtime support, as the Unity forums are so unreliable.
I would be happy to take a look at the issue with you and sort it out.
Here is the link to the skype group:
https://join.skype.com/df9FAzfHeRbB

 

There is a new version of helios 1.2 up on the store which has it linked to my Drop Box instead

 

Hi there, sorry I didnt see your message until now.
unity stopped sending me notifications about this thread and I didnt know people were even still using it.
I offer realtime support over on my Skype channel at: https://join.skype.com/df9FAzfHeRbB I would love to help you out with it, just drop in and chat anytime

 

Yes, take a look at the stereoGRAPHIC rendering option in Helios

 

I bought your asset yesterday and there was no documentation folder in it. I do not like tutorial videos for what I am doing. Where can I get the docs?

 

Hello! I'm interested in buying Helios and am wondering if it can achieve what I need it to. I played around with some other 360 video capture assets and have had trouble with recording audio. I'd like to time some sounds and music with the 360 video, but whenever I try to render out some gameplay, Unity starts running at 2 FPS. This makes it nearly impossible to sync sounds and music in game as the audio still plays normally while gameplay slows down to a crawl. Would Helios help me solve that issue?

 

We chatted on my skype group right?

 

Hey John,
I'm considering buying Helios for my project, but am unsure whether it will fit my requirements.
I will need to record some custom properties and control custom behaviours during the playback.
How much control do I have using the scripting API? Is there a callback for each frame I can use to update my behaviour? I'm fine with handling my initial behaviour recording and other updating stuff myself.
Thanks for you help,
Seneral

 

I do not have a callback system per frame like that no.
Helios does have a session recorder mechanism built in where you can record the camera position for each individual frame, but I dont think that would be much help for you.

 

No, it's custom data I need complete control over... Essentially recording mouse strokes and then re-applying these at render-time, triggering custom routines each frame that do take quite some time to compute. Too complex to even think of recording lol.
How difficult do you think would it be to implement that?
Thanks,
Seneral

 

Honestly....
Impossible
I tried early on with Helios to capture stuff like that, but you start breaking rules of determinism when you do this.

 

Hm, that sounds bad... So, Helios runs at a fixed time-per-frame rate, I assume? Or why would it be impossible to call external scripts and spend several ms (5-15) to calculate and update stuff?
Really trying to make this possible. I know it's very specific to my use case, so I'm willing to implement it myself, but I won't start if you're so convinced it's impossible...
As I said, a callback with the current 'emulated' render time or frame count would be enough for me to update my stuff.
Thanks for your help nevertheless!
Seneral

 

Sorry, that didnt mean to sound so harsh,

Helios runs at a fixed frame rate yes.

Mouse movement for character direction kind of stuff is reactive behavior. You as a player, or person recording a screen session are reacting to the environment. The application of lerp values is time contingent, and time is very different on a fixed rate than in a typical game update loop.

That being said, you are welcome to give it a shot, I just dont think you will have much luck as getting the timing right is just going to be very hard, especially if you plan on using co-routines. All you have to to is hook into the OnRenderImage method of the Helios scripts, which is a standard monobehaviour event. You can setup any system you like inside that method

 

Ah, ok, I didn't express myself clearly it seems. And no worries, didn't come over harsh, just being realistic towards an impossible request (which I hope turns out to be possible)
I want to record the mouse movement before recording, or rather the result of the mouse movement. No timing issues from reactive input here Basically similar to how the session manager works, but custom.
Only issue could be the fixed frame rate, I can't always exactly tell how long it is going to take each frame to update my stuff... So I think I just have to have a big time buffer to play with, which may unnessessarily lengthen the render time. Can I set the render time reserved for each frame manually if needed?
Hope it's clear what I need now. With that information, is such a callback viable?
Thanks,
Seneral

 

Well thats kind the point of the session recorder, to remove the need of all of the timing specific stuff and just record where the camera needs to be and that it needs to be looking at.

That being said, you can modify the session recorder code as you see fit (I cant support it) and add mouse XY or whatever, its just frame by frame JSON. It gets fed back in to the Helios controller script, so you can look in that one to see how it reads the frame position/rotation data.

That help?

 

Perfect Will have a look how it is implemented once I buyed it.
Probably will make it generic myself. Would be nice if a callback like that could be included by default (although, as I said, don't know to what extend as I don't know how it is implemented - per object or globally)
Thanks for your support!
Seneral

 

Also, extra question: Do you know by chance if Fog Volume 3 is supported?

 

Nevermind, saw Helios support explicitly mentioned in the Fog Volume 3 docs. Perfect!

 

Hi John, I'm using SLATE by paradoxnotion with Helios. I do this by making the Helios camera a child of the "render camera" which is the main camera that goes through the paths of dummy cameras inserted in the scene.

• For the most part it worked pretty well. But I use Salsa, and I realize Salsa does not wait for the frames (at least through SLATE and I bet it's the same without SLATE) . That is, it plays the audio at normal time, irrespective of the slowed down frame rate. The lipsync animation follows the audio. So this means that the lipsync appear too fast in the video recording.

• A second problem I encounter was that the sound recorder is of a lower pitch. Upon checking its duration, I find that the duration is slightly longer than the actual duration the whole cutscene. It seems to slow down slightly (4mins 18s vs 4mins)

Have you found cases like this before?

 

Solved issue 1. I didn't use their plugin which uses their native playclip function. Instead I use the audiosource while checking "use actor's audiosource". This works well.

Now left with the second problem, slowed down audio.

 

Ok so I solved 2 by using an audio editor (just used free Audacity) to retime the audio.

Besides this weird audio problem, it seems that Helios can work well with SLATE

 

Hello ,

I am trying to record 360 Stereoscopic video. Everything is OK. But , It's not rendering volumetric light and My global fog. Also, I rotated the skybox but in my rendered videos I can't see my skybox as I rotated .

Any help would be appreciated.

NVIDIA GTX 1070
8GB VRAM
32GB RAM
4.1 GHZ CPU

 

What volumetric lighting asset are you using? Without that info I think this can't be decided.
The one I am using requires a script attached to the camera, so you probably have to add that to all 6 (or 12 for 3D) cameras in the 360 rig I would assume
Seneral

 

Hello !,

First , thank you so much for your quick reply. My volumetric light can be found here (Hx Volumetric Lighting) . Fog is "Global Fog" which is placed in the unity's standart assets . And yes, I'm attaching scripts to the cameras. But there's only 2 camera in the 3d Video capture assets of helios (Slitcher L and Slitcher R)

 

And here is the final stereoscopic image :

 

Can Helios save an alpha channel or depth channel?

If i want to use two or more videos in unity like in one demo i saw in a Unity video on youtube, can i then use the alpha channel to see thrue the first video on objects between the first and second video?

Is it compatible with Unity 2017.1 so timeline and cinemachine ?

 

I second the previous question about using Helios with Cinemachine. My project involves recording a flythrough video. No 3D or 360; just a regular 60fps video. Also, would it be possibly to use Helios with the Post Processing Stack?

 

Well, I guess this was too good to be true The Stereoscopic option in Helios produces 'inverted stereo" at the rear 180.

I bought the asset about an hour ago, and from seeing the first render - thought I'd got a major problem solved. - no seam lines in a stitched image from Unity. This is actually true with Helios compared to the other USD 50 Panaromic asset (by OliVR).

The caveat here is - the stereoscopic implementation seems wrong. You get proper stereo in the "front" 180 and then it gradually goes to completely "inverted" stereo at the back.
It;s a rookie mistake in rendering 360 stereo with CG rigs and we've all gone through it at some point in the early days of video based VR.
Here's a better explanation: https://code.blender.org/2015/03/1451/

The other (OliVR;s panoramic) asset, does it correctly, but I was getting "stitch and ghosting seams" no matter how much I tweaked, that's why I bought Helios. Can I ask for a refund if it's ok? at least till the stereo-output is fixed?

Hoping you can fix this, because othwerwise the output is clean (mono) 360. and pretty fast.

 

Hello,

Sorry for the late reply,
Unity forum does not send me notifications on this thread, and I dont check it that often.
If you need immediate help, you can join my Skype support group to chat realtime:
https://join.skype.com/lm78216sUkZ0

To answer your questions:
Helios can save alpha based on chroma key settings built into it and export alpha on png and exr
Yes fully compatible with Timeline and 2017, just be sure to set the frame rate on the timeline settings to match Helios

 

Yes to all of this, and please join me on my skype support channel for realtime chat:https://join.skype.com/lm78216sUkZ0

I dont come to the Unity forums very often

 

Hi there, thanks for the purchase of Helios.
Helios is setup to use 2 IPD placed cameras, but the stereoscopic rendering issue you mention is correct, and I am looking at how to correct it without altering the stitching seams. If you would like a refund like you requested, please send me a PM and we can start that process.Thanks John

 

Hi there, can you join me on my Skype channel https://join.skype.com/lm78216sUkZ0
We can discuss your issues there, Unity is not sending me notifications on posts here.

Quick answer is that you need to use the Audio Recording setup on the Session recorder for Helios

 

LOVE THIS. I only have one question... I have an .mp4 playing in a MovieTexture via the VideoPlayer. No matter what frame rate I make my .mp4, and regardless of what frame rate I set in Helios, my .mp4 plays SUPER fast. It plays normal speed within Unity. It is only the video compiled by Helios that the speed of my video (all other animations and moving objects within my unity scene are fine) is really fast. What am I doing wrong?

 

Heya,
Thanks for your purchase of Helios.

So it's not that you are doing anything wrong, it's that Unity is being Unity.
As it turns out, the video player in Unity is much like the audio system...it runs in its own thread.
So, until Unity exposes an API to allow me to control the playback speed on that thread, it's just going to play at its own speed.

I know, it sucks

Sorry,

John

 

Scratch That.
I may have found a solution, could you send me a PM with your email address and order number.
I have some code I would like you to test to see how well it works.

Thanks,
John

 

Do you have an older version of this for Unity 5.5.0? I was looking to purchase but noticed in the requirements that it says 5.6.2 or higher?

 

You will want 5.6.0 at least for Helios, sorry

 

Hey,

I posted this on the Octane thread we had going as well, but I don't know if you still check that out.

"I picked this up just to see if there is any way to make the workflow better than importing my rendered .pngs into Premiere.

Its not hard to create a timeline which changes the sprite every frame to the appropriate render (using an animation) and layering in audio. Is there any way to have Helios create a movie directly from that? What about if I wanted to batch a bunch of these timelines?

My workflow using premiere right now is a) render everything out, b) create each movie one by one. This is _not_ time efficient (forgetting about the fact that I'm not batching these renders yet either). If there were a way using Helios to cut Premiere out of the loop (especially if I could batch these movies), then that would be great. If not ... I'll just have to wait until Octane gets you the API you need.

Right now this is a pretty horrible workflow if your working on a large number of different movies as opposed to one large one."

 

Yeah, I just replies: Join me on my Skype Chat group: https://join.skype.com/ux7ZAG2jPDBK

 

Hello people I need some help with Helios 3D. I have a scene where I a third party lighting script and a post process script that I would like to add on top of the Helios camera prefab.

It seems to work on the surface but as soon as I try to actually render some images both the third party script, and the post processing aren't visible in the preview screen, and don't show up in the rendere images either.

However when the camera is unarmed and I play the scene it does seem to work.

I was wondering if anyone else has had similair issues, I'm pretty much stuck and could use some help.

I have some screenshots that might help elaborate:





As you can see I have 2 scripts attached to the Helios camera.

 

Hi,
If you are using version 1.2.6 you should make sure that your processing effects are listed BEFORE Helios

 

Hi John, thank you for your reply. I figured that aswell, however that doesn't seem to work. Pardon me if I come across as slightly uninformed, I'm quite new to Unity.

 

It would be better if you could join me on my Skype support channel at https://join.skype.com/BC4iwPYcZ3q2

 

Hi John,
Just a quick question: can I also capture classic "2d" videos (& its audio) with Helios?

 

Yes and Yes
You should see my tutorials on www.helios3dvideo.com for details on audio capture though

 

Is it possible

I have a related question about 2D videos. How about multiple cameras? What if I wanted to shoot and record the same scene from different angles simultaneously?

 

You can record them into different folders and stitch them together in post with premier or whatever, or you can use something like Cinema Director or Unity's cinematic tool to plan the shot of a single camera

 

That sounds great. Thanks!