[RELEASED] Deckard Render - Cinematographic Renderer for Unity

Hi folks, I have started with some live streaming about making a short movie and will be doing it almost every day (as I'm working on this project). For those of you interested into filmmaking with Unity, and usage of Deckard, please subscribe to my channel, so that you can get notifications when I go Live. (and also, you can ask me questions).

 

Only watched a minute of it and the audio is pretty broken up, not sure if that is because youtube is still processing it or if you have a problem with recording your mic?
Just checked further into the vid and sound is good.

 

Sorry about that. It looks like there was some interference in audio as I was using a wireless microphone. It was fixed after 20 minutes of stream, when someone wrote that this was happening. I had to move slightly my receiver

 

Actually- it turned out to be our compression method- all is working, now! Thanks for your assistance - sorry for wasting your time.

 

Hi,

I am trying to use Deckard with Slate.
I am using your Deckard sync to slate script that you posted a while back, but I am having no luck.

I am not sure what combination to set things up in.
I have put Deckard on the main camera and the sync script on render camera.
I have removed the main camera, manually enabled the Slate render camera and added Deckard and sync to this.

Either way, when I enter play mode, Unity says there are no cameras rendering.
The cutscenes and camera work fine until I add Deckard, so I am unsure what is disabling the cameras on play.

Any assistance would be much appreciated.

Unity 2020.1.4f1

I am getting these errors
UnassignedReferenceException: The variable rt of DeckardPreprocess has not been assigned.
You probably need to assign the rt variable of the DeckardPreprocess script in the inspector.
DeckardPreprocess.OnDisable () (at Assets/DeckardRender/Scripts/DeckardPreprocess.cs:45)
UnityEngine.GameObject:SetActive(Boolean)
Slate.DirectorCameraDisable() (at Assets/ParadoxNotion/SLATE Cinematic Sequencer/Cameras/DirectorCamera.cs:261)
Slate.DirectorCamera:Awake() (at Assets/ParadoxNotion/SLATE Cinematic Sequencer/Cameras/DirectorCamera.cs:183)

NullReferenceException: Object reference not set to an instance of an object
DeckardAnimatorMotionBlur.currentAnimationName () (at Assets/DeckardRender/Scripts/DeckardAnimatorMotionBlur.cs:46)
DeckardRender.DeckardRender.BruteForceRendering () (at Assets/DeckardRender/Scripts/DeckardRender.cs:962)
DeckardRender.DeckardRender.LateUpdate () (at Assets/DeckardRender/Scripts/DeckardRender.cs:866)

Thanks
Cas

 

Three issues I'm having atm:
1) Can't get my LODs to all stay at their highest level and I'm noticing pops. I've tried setting my project to Ultra settings and giving an LOD bias of 6. Any recommendations on keeping all assets at their highest quality?
2) All of my foliage is disappearing on render. It's not like it pops in and out.. it just isn't showing up at all when I render, even though it does show up in the Deckard Preview window. It was all placed with the standard terrain tools.
3) I have a lens flare (standard unity asset) that looks really good in my Scene view and I can't get it to work with Deckard. Is there a way to either use the standard lense flare (maybe by adding a Deckard component?) or using another workflow?

Thank you very much.

Also just want to mention I was stuck on the black render bug for HOURS and @BrettCroomo's method from June 1, 2020 saved me. Thank you Brett!

 

Hi!
I want to render some 4k images from a project. Is there a way to render just one image?

 

Depends if you are using standard pipeline, or HDRP. Standard pipeline has a feature to render a scene by clicking on save facebook screenshot. But a best and suggested way of doing it is to capture as you would with video. Just set a number of frames to render to 1 or 2, and then render.

 

You could create a script that forces maximum LOD on start.
something along these lines:

Code (CSharp):

1. using System.Collections;
2. using System.Collections.Generic;
3. using UnityEngine;
4.  
5. public class ForceLODlevel : MonoBehaviour
6. {
7.  
8.     void Start()
9.     {
10.         //find all objects with LOD component in a scene
11.         LODGroup[] lodObjects = GetComponentsInChildren<LODGroup>(true);
12.         foreach(LODGroup lg in lodObjects)
13.         {
14.         //force highest lod to be rendered
15.             lg.ForceLOD(0);
16.         }
17.     }
18. }

I havent tested this, but I think that it should work. Just add this script to an empty object in your scene.

 

Be sure that you have a LensFlare layer component added to your deckard camera. It works for me.

Is this folliage using some custom shaders? Follieage should be rendered always. Does it render without Deckard in play mode?

 

Sorry, but I don't have any experience with Slate There is probably something that deactivates it.

 

Any news on the black frames rendering bug?

 

I have a video in my scene that I want to be playing while the deckard is recording - is there a way of capturing this using this recorder?

 

Hello, todayt I will be doing a live stream about new progressions in Deckard Developement.

 

@olix4242 Hi Oliver, can we found information regarding Deckard + HDRP, the readme in Deckard refers to PostProcessing V1 :/ Thanks!

Edit: My bad there is a "Unity HDRP Instructions!!!.txt", but frankly you should gather all those scatered docs in a master documentation, it's a bit of a mess right now

 

Hi! I'm a new user of Deckard and I have few questions.

Can Deckard work with PP volumes ? I bought Deckard because of this video :

. We need true DOF for transparent meshes and I think Deckard can be useful to achieve it.

I'm using Unity 2020.2.0b14 with DXR activated for path tracing features. I first tried without DXR without Path Tracing so and Deckard View is correct before rendering but the "Render animation" only renders black images since Deckard View and Game View become totally black when I start the export.

Do you know if Deckard is compatible with Path Tracing and Volumes ? I read on the manual it was working with PP Stack v1... is it the manual of the last version ? https://www.dropbox.com/s/j81ebdp7z597jn6/ReadMe.pdf?dl=0 For Path Tracing I don't see Deckard compute the samples so I guess it won't work with it ?

I think you did a great tool inside Unity and I hope I will be able to use it

 

Sorry, I didn't want to include HDRP into final documentation as it constantly changed and it would be a bigger mess to have something outdated in general documentation. Hopefully, we are now at more stable version of HDRP (Unity 2020.2 with HDRP 10), so some things are mostly sorted out. Same applies to Deckard and it's ability to work with HDRP and raytracing - is should be right now much more consistent and less processor heavy. So I will be sorting out also special sections dedicated to HDRP.

 

Deckard is compatible with raytracing features, but not with raytracing in Pathtracing mode. It actually wouldn't have any sense to make it compatible because path tracing is extremely slow, and using all Deckard features would make it hundred of times slower. You should look at Deckard as substitute for path tracing, as you can get all path tracing effects directly out of Deckard, in a fraction of time, without any noise and with better compatibility with general Unity workflow.

As for volumes, they are compatible and mentions about PPSv1 are only for those that are using Standard Pipeline.

 

Thanks!
Yes I know the pain, I'm glad we are now settling a bit with HDRP 10!
Deckard is really great, and I love your breakdown videos (and your futuristic desk setup )

 

Please excuse my ignorance, but what exactly is Deckard render? Its not obvious to me from reading a few posts here and checking the item on the asset store.

I mean if I have HDRP and DXR and use Unity recorder for output, what does Deckard give me that those dont already?

(...and do you have a Discord channel?)

 

Deckard was made to correct main issues of realtime graphics. HDEP and raytracing are powerfull, but you still can't output a broadcast quality (or use it for making real movies) Some of the issues are aliasing issues, motion blur issues, noise issues and image effects instability problems (like a bloom that shimmers) and other transparency issues. Deckard was made to eliminate all those issues so that you can actually output best possible quality images and animations out of Unity. Who needs it? Those that want to render out an uncompromised quality videos. Over that, as it simulates real camera color response, resulting images will have additional organic quality to them.
No, I don't have a discord channel. Most support is done over here, and you can watch my youtube channel where I'm constantly posting live streams and answering questions live.

 

Thanks, sounds good!

Briefly then....

1) Can I use Deckard in my HDRP Raytraced scene as is, or does Deckard have its own lights and materials I should use instead?

2) Is Deckard compatible with Cinemachine and Timeline?

3) We're coming from a traditional offline rendering background - 3dsMax and VRay rendeing out EXR. We're turning to realtime to speed up productiuon times and render times, but the quality is not there yet. Can we use Deckard output offline renders at the same speed (or faster) than Unity Recorder and faster than our 3dsMax VRay workflow?

4) Can I render 360 videos (and also stereo 360 videos)?

5) Can I render out render elements at the same time as the main beauty shot, so elements can be refined in After Effects, or Fusion? For example reflection, specular, material and object ID masks etc?

 

1) Timeline is fully supported and is recommended for any work. Cinemachine so-so. Didn't test latest versions that should have fixed some issues/bugs. But this can be fixed with unity Recorder.
2) You can use it as it is. There are some tricks that can be added on top of existing materials and lights, but they aren't mandatory.
3) It is slower than a standard unity rendering. But it is absolutely faster than VRay and similar offline renderers. All without any noise artifacts. Actually, Deckard is noiseless, so I had to introduce some film noise to keep it more natural. Rendering times with DRX can be pretty slow, and most of the times it is not necessary to use raytracing when using Deckard (you can go easily with SSR without problems). Beware that RTX workflow requires some more VRAM on graphics card and that it' isn't still too stable in Unity. I recommend more than 8gb of VRAM when rendering 4k or even Full HD with DXR.
4) No. At this moment no, but it is planed for some future release. But just for monoscopic 360 as Deckard philosophy isn't compatible with 360 stereo. If you need a good 360 capture, then you should check my VR Panorama 360 Pro that is more suitable for those needs. Deckard is really targeted mostly at cinematographic work that is quite different than 360 work (while it was still made with expertise that I've made by making VR Panorama).
5) No, And you actually don't want to render them out of Deckard. Forget your usual workflows I was using them all before making Deckard as I'm from the same background - filmmaking, production and 3D animation. and you really don't need them. You should think about Deckard as of real camera. It matches perfectly with real cameras (as it has included profiles for color matching with most used digital cameras and films - Arri Alexa, Canon DSLR, BMPCC4K, Fuji and Kodak.
Why I said that you should forget usual workflows? Because Deckard does some things much better than any post processing application. Mostly DOF and Motion Blur and this is where you actually need additional channels. There is no application that can do more correct motion blur than deckard at a same price of performance. In Deckard, motion blur and dof are free in terms of performance. And also: rendering with Deckard is always much faster than rendering a compositing in AFX or Fusion.
(One of the main reasons why it doesn't include channels is that it renders out everything with motion blur and DOF, so you can't extract those channels as they have to be encoded without any DOF or MB, and this would mean to loose best things of Deckard).

 

Some new work that I've made with Deckard:

 

I'm kinda disappointed with the product especially since I had such high hopes for it. It just doesn't seem to work and keep getting a black screen and 'display 1 no cameras rendering' whenever I try to record using Deckard. Tried both in 2019 and 2018 Unity HDRP versions. I don't know why it's doing that, is there a solution for this? I thought it was supposed to work without issues

 

Did you try this fix? If yes, contact me in private, andI will e help you.

 

Thanks you for your answer! Your video of the stormtrooper is really nice

For the DOF with Deckard, I did not manage to make it work with transparency (glass on the foreground make the background side the glass not blurry). Should I deactivate the DOF from the Volume ? If I do it, there no DOF anymore so I don't know how to use DOF and motion blur with Deckard. We finished to do our shots so I just need to add Deckard to export clean images without noise and with accurate DOF with no problem with transparency. I'm using Unity 2020.2 with raytracing.

Do you plan to do a breakdown of the stormtrooper scene ? It would be awesome to know how to integrate Deckard inside the raytracing pipeline of Unity

 

Sorry for a late response, but with all holydays and so..

Yes, you should always deactivate DOF (or motion blur) from a volume when rendering with Deckard. You don't need it and it will accumulate with deckards DOF. Deckard does it's own physically correct DOF. If you want a shallower (more pronounced DOF) you have to drop down aperture size in Deckard (or even change sensor size to something bigger). Deckard keeps a physical properties of real cameras, so be sure that your objects are correctly scaled in Unity. If your object is too small, you may have too much blurring, if they are too big, you will not have enough blurring. If those things are set correctly, it will always do a physically correct simulation and there is no anything that should be additionally set to make it work. If you send me some screenshots (in private) I can probably tell you better what can be wrong.

 

Yes, I will be posting it online soon. I've already did a live stream, but I had some problems because of Mixamo animations, and I couldn't solve them in few minutes, I removed it from youtube just to trash that part of a stream. (no, you don't want to listen me for 30 minutes of phrases: "Oh, this should work, but it doesn't.. why? why? WHY?")

 

Bonjours j'ai regardé les anciens commentaires qui parlaient du problème de rendu noir et il s'avère que j'ai le même, j'ai vu que olix4242 avait parlé de désactivé le deckard render.. mais en fait j'ai rien compris je ne vois pas ce qu'il faut désactiver et je n'obtient que des fonds noir... j'espère que quelq'un pourra m'aider à utiliser le plein potentiel de Deckard Render.

 

Sorry, but I really need much more information on when does it happen, what Unity version are you using, or any information that can be helpfull on solving an issue, and also, maybe in english language. I don't speak french language, so for me it's really difficult to understand what is going on.

 

[QUOTE = "olix4242, post: 6683650, membre: 354244"] Désolé, mais j'ai vraiment besoin de beaucoup plus d'informations pour savoir quand cela se produit, quelle version d'Unity utilisez-vous, ou toute information qui peut être utile pour résoudre un problème, et aussi, peut-être en langue anglaise. Je ne parle pas la langue française, donc pour moi c'est vraiment difficile de comprendre ce qui se passe. [/ QUOTE]

Pardonnez-moi, j'avoue que cela manque de détails. J'ai d'abord essayé Deckard sur la version 2019.4 que j'utilise actuellement, mais quand j'ai vu que cela ne fonctionnait pas, j'ai décidé de l'essayer sur une version antérieure, la version 2018.4 et le même problème. Le problème se pose toujours lors d'un rendu. Je n'ai jamais eu de problème avant de faire le rendu. J'espère avoir été plus clair et que mon anglais est compréhensible. Merci d'avance pour votre réponse.

 

Hello!, I'm a new Deckard Render user here.. loving it so far, and getting exceptional results except in one area with Cinemachine (particularly when using a VCam attached to a fast moving Dolly Cart. The object on the Cart that the VCam is looking at has a blur I can't fix). I'll post a short vid to show the prob I'm having and perhaps someone knows how to solve.. I was hoping though, from copying the Quote above, to ask if it would be possible to video demo exactly how to do step 2 and 3 as I'm not understanding how this works with multiple cameras, some that mix into others.. Thanks!, and again - great tool!

 

Following up my last post with a link.. my humble first project using Deckard Render.. but asking for input on how to improve something.. At seconds 14, and 30 are two different cuts that utilize a CM VCam on a dolly cart riding alongside the main (ship) object. I'm using a technique someone mentioned earlier in this forum to have DRender focal distance stay consistent with the subject's position (using a dummy object who's transform position stays updated with that of the subject). One thought to fix was to clone the scene, and do the closeups without any dolly cart speed at all and just have the cameras look at a non moving ship. Unsure if there is a better technique or setting.

 

I see where you have a problem. What Unity version are you using? I think that this issue was solved in latest versions of Cinemachine (but I didn't try it - I always like to do those animations by hand). Cinemachine was made for realtime usage, so it isn't a perfect tool for this kind of virtual production.
You can try rendering with Safe mode - it should fix this issue (you can find it one of my latest posts).
Another way is to use Unity Recorder and bake your animations as pure animations that you insert later in Timeline. In this way you can override problems with Cinemachine. Sorry about this problem, but it really doesn't depend on me but how Cinemachine works.

 

I'm using 2019.4.16f, and was using the latest Cinemachine, but have since reverted to the 2.6 verified version. I did notice a bit of improvement as I also dialed down the loose dampening in the transposer. I agree, Cinemachine works pretty good for real-time, but I now know what you're saying in terms of slight nuances between runs that produce unpredictable results. I may try your safe mode suggestion, but for now I'm much happier with the look (will post something shortly). thanks! btw.. looking forward to the chroma tool you've mentioned on twitter.. ultimately I'd like to try to put someone in the closeup ship parts...

 

I forgot to say> I like your animation. Terrain looks great.

 

For anyone interested, here is a latest stream where I have a special guest Antonia Forster from Unity and we talk about virtual production/deckard/Deckard Chroma Key and many other things related to Unity.

 

Figured out my focus issue from a post ago. Basically, not an issue with Cinemachine, rather I had DRender setup using 180 angle and f/stop 11 for entire scene. Created a script that could be attached to DRender component with methods that smoothly animate f/stop and shutter angles to different values over time. Timeline signals with a signal receiver on the DRender gameobject let me dial in f/stop and/or angle as needed. (gist here).
Here's an updated render. Key part to see a smooth change from f/stop 8 to 0.6 and angle from 90 to 5 is at second 30.

 

Yes, it looks somewhat better because it doesn't have anymore that stuttering blur effect. But this is a normal behaviour if you slow down you shutter. In that case you are actually loosing any natural motion blur. I am sure that without cinemachine (with baked movement) it would look even better.

 

Is there anybody else who has the problem with rendering black screens?
I tried it in 2019.4 and 2020.2 Built-In and HDRP.

 

Yes. If I recall correctly it might happen when you have a second Unity window open and selected. Possibly the animation panel. I’ll do some tests and see if I can recreate it. In any event it was not related to the version of Unity.

 

Found it (probably):
Game Windows must not be opened at the time you hit "render animation".

 

Game Window can be opened, but it is important that a Scene window is also opened and visible (this is a requirement for some hacks that are happening under a hood).

 

OK I hit the black frame render today. The solution that worked for me was to change Deckard Render Settings to this:

 

Is there a way to render directional light flares in Deckard? It's showing up fine in game view but doesn't show up in Deckard view

 

Is Deckard still being updated? I see news of your cool new livestreams, but on the Asset Store it says last update was 4 May 2020. Are you the only developer and mainly a one man team for Deckard?

I use a lot of other beta software and newer assets, so thought I'd ask here before commiting a purchase to this great looking asset. Do you foresee any issues using it with the latest Unity 2021.1.0b7 for example? (and other Assets like Gena Pro, GPU Instancer)

 

@olix4242 ?

Where's best place to get support? I'm in need of this asset for a project and bound to have some questions, seems the forums not the best place for support or answers.

For support, I would expect at least an answer within 24 to 48 hours, will that be the case?

(My project is using HDRP 12.0 and Raytracing with Unity 2021.2.0a6)

If for some reason it doesnt work (or I cant get hold of Oliver), would I be able to get a refund?

 

It is updated, and current version, with patch found here (in previous posts) works fine. It wasn't updated on assetstore because patch is only required/wanted for HDRP. It just fixes some issues with HDRP... but those issues are actually in Unity HDRP implementation, and not in Deckard, so this patch isn't included into a official release - because, as HDRP matures, that patch won't be necessary.

 

I can't look into a future some unity version might break up. If you are using HDRP, Deckard works best with 2020 and HDRP10. Any lower version of HDRP isn't suggested (as they all have one or another memory leak problem). But as I've said, as times go by, new HDRP versions should be more stable and should work better with Deckard (if there aren't some bigger bugs).