[RELEASED] Deckard Render - Cinematographic Renderer for Unity

I have purchased this asset and have generated 100 frame images sequence in the Capture folder. When I click the Encode Video from Existing Sequence button, I get the following error:

Win32Exception: Access denied
System.Diagnostics.Process.StartWithShellExecuteEx (System.Diagnostics.ProcessStartInfo startInfo) (at <735c83e43c004ee998f77c68cf8035da>:0)
System.Diagnostics.Process.Start () (at <735c83e43c004ee998f77c68cf8035da>:0)
(wrapper remoting-invoke-with-check) System.Diagnostics.Process.Start()
System.Diagnostics.Process.Start (System.Diagnostics.ProcessStartInfo startInfo) (at <735c83e43c004ee998f77c68cf8035da>:0)
System.Diagnostics.Process.Start (System.String fileName, System.String arguments) (at <735c83e43c004ee998f77c68cf8035da>:0)
DeckardRender.DeckardRenderEditor.OnInspectorGUI () (at Assets/DeckardRender/Scripts/Editor/DeckardRenderEditor.cs:352)
UnityEditor.UIElements.InspectorElement+<CreateIMGUIInspectorFromEditor>c__AnonStorey1.<>m__0 () (at /Users/builduser/buildslave/unity/build/Editor/Mono/Inspector/InspectorElement.cs:501)
UnityEngine.GUIUtilityrocessEvent(Int32, IntPtr) (at /Users/builduser/buildslave/unity/build/Modules/IMGUI/GUIUtility.cs:179)

I'm assuming this button, when clicked, would build those 100 frames into a movie of sorts. I'm using
Unity 2019.2.9of1

I do have Premiere Pro, as well, just wanted to try the button out.

 

What OS are you using? Are you sure that you have all privilegies on your HD and that some antivirus isn't blocking acces to Exe files?

 

Sorry meant to add I'm on Mac OS.

 

Ok, then it's probably what I've said before: you don't have execution privilegies on that folder/file. Mac OS simply blocks it. You have to call " chmod u+x" on the ffmpeg-binary (from terminal) in DeckardRender/StreamingAssets, and this will make it work.

 

Hi!
I will be submitting new Deckard Render 2.0 version to assetstore tomorrow.
It features some important improovements over previous version.
-Extremely better performance/responsivness in editor workflow with a new Responsive Rendering Mode
-Better Antialiasing - right now it can match antialiasing of a real camera.
-Better sharpening.
-More color correction customization options like on real camera (white ballance, tint)
-New procedural physically correct simulation of real camera grain/noise that is able to simulate grain and noise form physical film to digital camera sensor.
-Ability to do Off Axis projection (for Projection Mapping and VR caves)
-Support for a secondary (full) screen monitoring. You can now work in Unity, while previewing image on a secondary monitor/TV set.
-Tool for doing camera movement capture with a help of VR device (like Oculus Quest or HTC vive)
-New professional analyzing tools like Overexposure Zebras and contrast focus peaking.

This is the version that I've announced before and wanted to publish earlier, but I've doing much of betatesting so that it doesn't break functionality. This is a major update, and I have spent a lot of time into tuning Deckard's behaviour and performance in editor (one of the biggest complaints about this asset was it's heavy usage in editor - now it should be fixed completely, and customizable for your needs and your hardware)
There are also some new important features that didn't go into this build, but that I intend to introduce pretty soon.

 

I just bought this asset and have a question regarding HDRP - which version of Unity should I be using? My project is currently running on 2019.3.8f1. Should I switch to 2019.1.14?

 

I thought someone posted a link to download PPS V1 - it's no longer available through the asset store - can anyone share the link?

 

https://www.dropbox.com/s/gip731519dwkht6/deckardpps.unitypackage?dl=0

 

Thank you - I'll give this a try.

 

Also - is Deckard Render 1.4f the current version? I'm not seeing 2.0 in the asset store.

 

Also, also, this is the project I want to use Deckard Render on - it's currently rendered using HDRP in 2019.3.8. I am a new Unity user and this is my first project with Unity - still trying to figure a lot of things out!

 

Nothing about this asset seems to be working for me . . . I imagine it's partly due to my lack of experience with Unity or perhaps that I'm using a Mac?

 

Deckard 2.0 isn'0t available yet. It will be in few days as soon as it gets aprooved by assetstore team.

I can't understand what is your issue from your screenshot. Could you describe it more?
But I might think what could be, so I'm guessing.
I see that you are using Decklard Ambient Light in your scene. Shis one doesn't work in HDRP if you also use another Directional Light. Currently HDRP supports only one directional light per scene, so this is a limit of HDRP. Ambient light requires support for multiple Directional lights, so it won't work correctly and will break a lighting in a scene.
Also, there is a bug in HDRP that produces heavy memory leaks if any realtime directional light gets moved. As Deckard internally has to move lights, only solution on systems affected (it happens on certain combination of Unity versions/HDRP versions) with this bug is to NOT use Deckard Area light on directional light.
More about this bug:
https://issuetracker.unity3d.com/is...ks-when-the-sun-is-updated-every-frame?page=2

 

olix4242 Hello there!
I've been wondering is it possible to use Deckard Renderer with any Rendering Farms/Cloud Rendering solutions?
I've got a powerful laptop but I don't think it's designed for heavy rendering)

Thanks for all your hard work, it's simply amazing!

 

Hi,
No, Deckard can't doesn't with rendering farm/cloud solutions because it's tied to Unity internal renderer. And actually, as unity projects are pretty big, even if this could be done, you would need more time to upload project and download final animation then to render things out with Deckard localy. Typical rengering time for most complex projects (like the ones that I'm posting from time) is about 1-3 seconds for a single frame when using recent graphics cards (GTX 1080 - RTX 2070).
What graphics card are you using on your laptop?

 

I am using NVIDIA GTX 1080
Usually rendering in 2K with 60fps.
Recently I've replaced my laptop coolers with new ones and a guy from tech service asked me what exactly am I doing with my laptop, I replied: "Nothing much, just rendering the movie" so he advised me not to do it on my laptop)

 

Why 60 fps? (I admit that I hate 60fps look - it is no non-cinematic).
I don't think that a few minutes of rendering can harm anything - it is just like gaming. Also, a guy from tech service probably knows that rendering uses pretty hard CPU. But we are using here mostly only GPU, and GPU is made to handle those workloads.
Untill now, Deckard could be pretty heavy on rendering while working in Unity.. but with a new rendering threading, it will stress graphics card much less - atleast while working in Editor.

 

Thanks for the update.
Yeah, I know that 60 fps looks non-cinematic, but I've tried to render in 24/30 frames a couple of times but sometimes it looked a bit "stuttery".
So, Oliver, are you saying that all your render videos (Facebook/Twitter) were shot in 24 fps? Could you share the screenshot of your Deckard Inspector?
Honestly speaking, I'd rather render in 24 fps because of its cinematic look and fast render time, but I am not sure how to achieve the Deckard Cinematic Quality yet, although I've been using it for 10 months (60 fps mostly)

 

Hey guys, here's my final result using Deckard Render,the buffer output exr sequence then i graded in Davinci reslove,and thank you Oliver for your works

 

Nice
There is something that I find strange: motion blur seems over-exagerated. Are you using 180 shuttar speed or more? If you are using more, than try to set it to 180 - motion blur will look more natural. If it's set to 180, then you probably have also active vector motion blur in Unity or temporal antialiasing. Turn both of them off as they produce motion blur that is too strong.

 

Hi folks,
new version of Deckard render is available on assetstore. Please, check it, and let me know if it works fine for you.

 

Testing Unity Raytrace HDRP with Deckard Render.

 

Is Decard render working with Raytracying in Unity 2020.1 / 2020.2 ?

 

It wasn't tested in unity 2020 with raytrace, but it probably should work, possibly even better than in Unity 2019 that I have used, because I immagine that some bugs were solved in meantime. But I really can't give any guarantee when we are dealing with beta/alpha versions of unity.
You ca try, and report if it works or not, or if there are some problems.

 

Yeah,I was using 180 angle shutter,and turn off DOF and MotionBlur in HDRPpipeline profile,Antianlising was set to None.

 

Hi, just purchased Deckard Rendering, it's without any doubt one of the best assets I ever used.
It reworked my workflow beyond what I could ever dream.

Here's a small clip I did this afternoon, always wanted to remake this iconic moment of the Apollo Powered Descent to the moon.
It's done now.

 

Hello,

First attempt to try Deckard Render (with latest version). I'm having black screen in the outputs (both jpegs and mp4 files) and warning messages at console : Releasing render texture that is set to be RenderTexture.active

I also tried the demo scene of Deckard Render, the result is the same.

Any hints ?

ps : Unity version is 2019.2.6f1

 

I can only see images/renders when I click "render with alpha (experimental)" to ON - and then it will only render 3 frames and crash my workstation.

Doesn't matter if I try a simple cube, or a Gaia scene set to lunatic settings.

Latest Deckard Render
Unity 2019.3.11
64 gig ram
2x Nvidia K6000 GPU

So I don't think it's a case of "is your PC powerful enough"?

Awesome asset though.

 

Hi @olix4242, I'm interested in buying this plugin, but before I do, I wanted to check something. I have a system, where it receives some camera positions, stores them in a queue and then it goes one by one and renders the images. Would the motion blur work with that? My concern is, that the camera is not "animated" with a controller. With every update(), the camera is translated to the next frame and then rendered. These frames take quite a bit of time to render. We might get something like 8-10 frames per second. Time wise though, each frame is equally spaced from the previous one. The camera translations are exported from a DCC software. So they have a fixed framerate.

 

@olix4242 we have a movie that is set up to use cinemachine virtual cameras that have different depth of field, and some shots that use rack focus. What is the recommended way to handle this if you use deckard?

 

Be sure to check latest version that went online today.
Demo scene had some errors due to updating process.
I think that it should work now. Be aaware, that if this happens in other scenes, you will have to re-configure deckard - Delete Deckard render component, and then add it again. I had to make some structural improovements to Deckard, so it might have problems with scenes done with earlier versions.

 

This can happen if there isn't enough VRAM available - but it is strange that it happens on a 12 gb card. (BTW, deckard can't use both of your cards) What is your final resolution? Are you using SLI configuration? If you are, this might be a problem. I haven't had a chance to test Deckard with SLI.. and I'm not sure that it even works.
Anything alse that might give me some insight on your problem?
Are you using HDRP?
p. s. Be sure to download a latest version that went online today. It has some better memory management.

 

Hi, I'm not recomending to use cinemachine directly. Unfortunately, from my experience I have noticed that cinemachine is pretty broken as it behaves differently in edit vs. play mode. It is more suited for realtime and interactive applications and less for movies. It is almost impossible to get perfect repeatable motion.
But it can be used for autoring. I'm ussualy doing this:
1) use cinemachine to author camera animations
2) use Unity Recorder (it can be downloaded from Package Manager) to bake animations in realtime. Just create Recorder track in timeline, and set it to record into Unity Animation.
3) use your recorded clips instead of cinemachine. You will get a better control of them, and you can add more easily things like focus.
Of course, Deckard will work with cinemachine, but you will probably get frustrated if you wan't to have repeatable camera movements with a same speeds and random movements.

As for controlling focus or aperture, this is best done with animating parameters in animator/timeline. If you are using timeline, aniamte your camera, and then click on a right from record button: and choose "Edit in Animation View".
In animation view add a property:
-Deckard Render/FocusDistance (for controlling focus distance)
-DeckardRender/Fstop (for aperture/DOF)

One of the problems with Deckard is when dealing with camera CUT's. Unfortunately, Deckard doesn't "know" if you are moving a camera or if you are doing a CUT. For Deckard, a simple cut is threated as a movement, so it will produce one frame of motion blur. This is why I usually render single cameras, one by one into different animations.
Or, I render them all, and then I'm deleting frames that have a blur.

p. s. I'm planing on adding some sort of Ai that will be able to 'guess' if we are dealing with a simple cut or if we are just moving camera.

 

Hi, yes. Motion blur will be estimated as Deckard takes previous frame and interpolates estimated camera positions and rotations. But, it is important that your script moves camera in Update() and not in LateUpdate(), because Deckard uses LateUpdate for it's own camera transformation.

 

Great, many thanks for the reply @olix4242

 

Thanks, appreciate the detailed reply!

 

@olix4242, Hello there.
Unity 2019.3.9f1
Latest updated Deckard Renderer

1) I used to make screenshots to check the focus and overall shot but after the update, all I can see is an underexposed image of the screenshot.
2) For some reason the system does now allow me to cancel the recording, it's just unresponsive
3) By the way, I've never noticed any problems with Cinemachine and Deckard Renderer
4) Also what about the new "follow object" option in ANIMATION/TIMELINE? I mean, how to use it properly?

The Deckard became faster and more responsive, fantastic work!

 

Hello @olix4242

I have a problem with animations of characters that have multiple materials on the skinned mesh. They're jittering in Deckard.
Is there any possibility to make it work?

 

I see that you have edited this question, but I will reply the same, as there might be other users that can get confused with a new behaviour. Deckard now uses different system for rendering while in Editor.. this system assures that you can limit it's speed to save resources for working in Unity. Also, this assures that your CPU and GPU doesn't get too hot. But you can alwyays ballance this value with a Batch Counts slider.

Unfortunately, this feature now requires to turn off "Responsive Rendering Mode" before doing a screenshot. I hope to resolve this issue in a near future.

As we are now using Deckard View, it can happen that deckard view covers progress bar, so it won't receive any commands. Be sure to move it away from a center of a screen before rendering. Or just, be sure not to click on it. I know that this isn't intuitive, but at a moment we don't have a way to force it to stay on a top of everything else. I will see what can be done.

This can be used in some cases when you have a camera or any other object that moves with a script or by some other system/plugin that doesn't use Timeline. So you can for example set an object that your camera should follow/mimic. This is more of a troubleshooting tool for getting compatibility with some other camera movement systems.

 

Hi, pèlease be sure to check documentation that comes with Deckard, there is a section that explains what should be done in case like this.
"
Some characters could have this bad habit of having problems with root objects, and this could trigger one of the bugs in unity. When this happens?
-your character uses multiple materials
-each part of a character uses different root bone objects
FIX:
-Select all skinned mesh parts (all character objects that use Skinned Mesh Renderer component)
-In Skinned Mesh Renderer script look for a value of Root Bone. You will notice that all objects probably have different Root Bones.
-In a hiearchy view find an object that is usually called "mixamo:Hips" (for Fuse characters). If you use your own custom characters, than this object chould be a root of your bones system. -Drag and drop this object into a Root Bone field.
-Now, all your skinned mesh parts should have a same root bone object and your animation will play correctly."

 

Latest version works a lot better, getting saved images/videos now, but it's still a big buggy. DR seems to like "Export Alpha Channel" to ON more than OFF.

I'm using Unity Standard, no SLI on GPUs. 1080p & 4k renders.

Would be cool if I could use both GPUs, I've crashed out a few times with big Gaia scenes.

Plays well with SEGI and SSMS, just like you said it would.

Thanks for the upgrade.

 

Are you using PNG as image sequence? If you are, then it's normal not to see images in your browser because they will be exported with Alpha channel set to 0. They contain all image data, but that data isn't visible. At this moment this is the only way when dealing with PNG. This is because of how Unity threats alpha channels and saves PNG's. This could be fixed, but it would simply kill performance as it would require more memory usage, and few pixel conversions. Operations that cost too much.
Btw, mostly, there is no any need to export PNG's, and JPG's will do just fine. It is much faster than using PNG, and a quality is pretty similar (JPG's are encoded in maximum quality)

 

I was thinking on doing a live webinar about Deckard render on youtube, where I can answer some questions in realtime. Is anyone interested?

 

I'm working on a new feature for Deckard. This one is a chromatic abberation for spot lights.

 

@olix4242 Hi Oliver!
I must compliment you again on this amazing plugin!
The Chromatic shadows look superb! Is it using coloured cookie textures in the area light?

Deckard is already an important part of our pipeline!
It really hits that visual sweet spot for teams exporting video from Unity all the time!

This post is really just a humble wishlist of features or tweaks we hope you'll consider in the near future?
This extension almost ticks enough boxes to be what Vray is to 3dsMax and fit into any pipeline! We have just a few things we'd love to see considered! Thanks so much for your time.

1. We'd love to more easily browse and select specific, external export directories and/or select an image file/seq to save over from inside Unity.
   Right now we have to regularly copy paste different folder locations and paste this before the /filename.
2. Rendering an image seq to Mp4 or ProRes doesn't seem to save a video file? Only ticking "Encode H.264 after rendering..." seems to work? Was quite confusing to begin with. But still seems it will only Encode H264 regardless of Video format chosen - so no ProRes is saved?
3. We'd love to be able to have the H.264 or ProRes encode process run on a finished seq in a unique folder, outside the Root unity project folder - based on where we pointed the export of the file - or based on the last folder who's sequence completed.
4. We'd also love to be able to name each image sequence via auto-generated text strings that acts as a prefix/replacement for our File Names. For example scenename_00001 or date_time_00001 or timelinename_0001 etc. Like Unity's Recorder 2.20 Link. A wildcard drop-down would be awesome!
5. We'd also love to be able to control the compression quality of Eg. Jpegs, ProRes outputs ourselves, then ramp quality up at the end of production. Could you expose those settings?
   
6. We'd love Deckard to work with Unity's Recorder 2.0 (Or at least like it in some respects - please see below)
7. Ticking "Capture on Play" in Deckard Render Component, does not seem to trigger "Deckard" when clicking the "Start Recording" button in Unity Recorder 2.20 and it enters Play mode?
8. Like "Recorder", we'd love to queue a single Deckard camera multiple times... Eg. once to export every Nth frame for QA, again for a single high res 3K image from frame 1 and 200, and again being a HD 1080p Jpg sequence which is saved as ProRes after completion.
   It would need to remember the separate sets of settings for each output "template" for next time we need to export all again after client changes.
   This is similar to a common situation where changing a prefab in Unity that affects 30 scenes means we need to export 30-60 Deckard cameras individually all over again! Haha! Sooo slow...
9. If you explain Unity's Recorder is simply incompatible with queuing Deckard cameras; then we'd love some kind of Deckard Render Manager functionality which can store and queue our Deckard cameras for exporting in batches. This would include storing the different render settings to cover the above scenarios in points 8. and 9.
   This was essentially what Recorder did for us. Now your Amazing renderer leaves us unable to use Recorder!
   Stuck between a rock and a hard place! haha! What a conundrum!
10. Recorder now works with "Unity Presets" - this would be soo great to get working for Deckard too! Using presets on Deckard components does not seem to apply the preset settings in 2019.3 at least?
    
11. We'd love a way to bulk disable, compare settings, copy or update settings across all or selected Deckard Cameras per scene or even across an entire project!
    Just like the Unity Light Explorer window lets us turn on shadows for all lights etc. (Link) << Would be Amazing.
12. The Preview Focus Planes hasn't seemed to work as expected in HDRP versions for us so far - does it depend on a non-hdrp shader? We do most of our exports out of HDRP now. The Camera Focus Peaking works super great though! So thanks for adding!
13. Lastly a small thing - but because we use them so often, we wanted to ask about the buttons at the bottom of the Deckard Render Component. Initially they don't all "work" or the conditions for them to work are unclear.
    The order also seems a little random and all are given equal visual importance which is hard for first time users.
    Perhaps greying out the buttons that "do nothing" until there is input to use them? Or when a unique folder is defined, its address is previewed underneath?
    Little things like that would make our day to day use of the tool that much more intuitive!

Sorry for such a long post - Promise to pop into the forum more often and keep these short.
Please take your time in responding - no rush!

Just some feedback from major fans of your Deckard Render!
Much thanks mate! Keep up the amazing work!

 

Thanks for the response. Yeah I've edited the commentary, for about the first 4 minutes the response time was very slow, but after I tweaked batch groups it became much faster.

I've followed your suggestion and tried to render in 24 fps but it seems that I still need to find that sweet spot in settings to be able to achieve the cinematic quality. Attached the test video. Could you give me some tips on how can I achieve it?
(default Deckard settings, placed timeline asset for motion blur, changed sensor type to IMAX)

 

Yes, that would be really good. I just got Deckard and had few questions but got my answer fortunately through this forum. It would be good if you were showcasing it and any questions you can easily answer while showing it live.

 

Great! I like the motion and 24 fps looks perfectly fine to me.
Mu suggestion is to add a Deckard Soft Light on your Direct Light (or to put a bigger radius on it). Also, I would try to add some ambient occlusion.
This one isn't technical, but more of an artistic thought: when your character does a punch move into a camera, I would pull that focus a little bit faster, so that it's hand stays in focus.

 

Yes, I did that, however, my character has just one skinned mesh with multiple materials and it animates badly. Can I fix this somehow?

 

What Unity version are you using?
This was a bug in Unity, but I think that is was fixed in versions above 2019.