[RELEASED] VR Panorama - render 360 stereo videos

Well, you should probably render in a higher resolution. 4k video is probably a minimum for 360 videos if you need a good quality.

 

Hi, I don't understand what is happening here. But to mee it looks like a error that comes from your video player. I should look at a original file (360 youtube) to be able to tell anything more.

 

Hi ! I'm trying to capture single frames at runtime, but that does not seem work : I have set Capture Mode to "Still Image" and I'm using JPG. When I press the key for capturing, I see one frame with the message "press ESC to abort", and it stops immediately without saving anything. Am I doing something wrong ? I have left the "Save Folder" to VR_Sequence, and tried to create it manually .. with no change.

 

I was using a fairly current version VR Panorama and Unity 5.6 when I upgraded to Unity 2017.2 and tried to upgrade to the newest VR Panorama. Now the scripts won't compile and I get an error and the Panorama Camera is not in my game object selection list. I have removed the VRPanorama folder and reinstalled it and it still gives me compile errors.
If I start a new project and import it, everything works great...it is my older project that wont play nice.

Any suggestions??

 

Depends on your compile errors. Without knowing what they are, it's really hit in the dark.

 

I really don't know right now. I can't remember anymore without trying it out, but I think that a save folder gets created outside of your Unity build. So, if your build is in C://YourGame, screenshots should be in C://VR_Capture folder.
Not sure about that, but I suggest you to check if your folder wasn't created there.

 

Found the issue : I have to place the directory "StreamingAssets" into myprogram_Data\VRPanorama\StreamingAssets. The exitool was not found : now it is, and it works fine.


Thks

 

Hi all,

I was having an issue with seam alignment in unity 2017.1 with monoscopic stills. Make sure to uncheck virtual reality supported in your player settings to fix this issue. Simply checking "Disable VR Tracking" won't resolve this on it's own.
The error is illustrated in the top portion of the attached image and the resolved version is on the bottom portion. I haven't tested this with video capture, but I spent about 45 minutes trying to solve this so hopefully my time can save someone else's.

-Sean

 

Hi, We are trying to get a 360 Image as PNG. But we observed shadow of a cube in the image for both Mono and Stereo images. The cube shadow does not appear for JPG images.
Can you please help us figure out this issue.
Please check the uploaded file.

 

@lnfyvrlab : remove the alpha channel of your PNG (set it to completely white, for example).

 

Hi, I’m trying to render out a scene in stereoscopic where the player climbs a ladder and I’m having some issues with really bad seams along the ladder. I know the FAQ says that I should avoid tall thin objects but it’s unavoidable.

I tried rendering out the scene with and without high quality stitching and the results look pretty much the same. I also tried moving the player further away from the ladder which helped slightly, but I can’t really move him much further away without it looking weird.

Is this definitely stitching, as I’ve seen other videos posted here that don’t seem to suffer from the same problem. If so, any ideas on if this is possible to fix, or is it an inherent problem with stereoscopic capturing?

 

@Pode : Removing Alpha channel does not work. Setting it to some other color makes the cube take that color.

 

Here it works.

 

This was done in photoshop - but it's anyway, only a PNG visualization problem (as to how image preview software treats PNG alpha, and how unity treats PNG alpha. If you don't need alpha, and here it looks like you don't, just deactivate PNG alpha export option in VR Capture script.

 

You should probably use HQ rendering, with Environment distance set to something like 100. But, your example looks like a cropped image, so it's not a best way to valuate stitching. Actually, a best way to valuate it is to view it in headset, as some things that are visible on screen, arent actually visible in headset.

 

Hello!

I am having a problem with the video that I made with VR Panorama. Everything but the Earth is OK. Earth looks deformed on the top... Do you maybe know where the problem is?

 

It's really impossible to tell from this screenshot. What is the source image? What are VR Panorama rendering settings? How is this reprojected? I really need more info..

 

Here is a picture of Settings that I used in Unity and one of the rendered pictures. The closer I go to the Earth(in VR video)... more it is deformed.

 

You are doing something wrong in your re-projection of 360 panorama. Here is how it looks when done correctly:

I can only assume that you are reprojecting image on a spherically mappedsphere (and that should be OK) but your camera isn't centered at center of a sphere. When doing reprojection, you camera has to be always at a center of a reprojection sphere - otherwise a reprojection math will be wrong. And you are probably moving your camera inside this sphere - but this isn't something that can be done with 360 projections.

 

Hi, I tried another render with HQ stitching and the environment distance set to 100 and it doesn't seem to have made much difference. I also looked at the video using my phone and the seams are quite noticeable. Unfortunately I can't show a full image, however I uploaded a new image that shows more of the surrounding area. Do you have any other ideas on how I could improve this?

 

What are your VR Panorama settings?
i think that you can imroove it a little more by tweaking settings. But, this type of shots should be always avoided when dealing with 360 videos. Having close objects abowe or below head is a thing that doesn't translate well in 360 video. And even if you can get it without any noticable stitching artifacts, it will be simply WRONG in 360 stereo video - and will cause headache due to a wrong stereoscopy (and polar coordinates, for a way of how 360 stereoscopy works, will always use wrong stereoscopy). So this is always some sort of a tradeoff.

 

Hi, I've attached my current settings. I'm rendering at 1080p 2xAA just for speed in testing, for the final render I'm currently using 2048x2048 4xAA, although I may also later use 8192x8192 and whatever AA my graphics card can manage.

I know about the issues with tall objects being close to the camera, and have managed to circumvent similar issues in other parts of the scene by moving the camera further away. Unfortunately I'm unable to do this here as it needs to feel like the player is climbing the ladder, rather than floating far away from it.

 

Ok, here I have spotted what might be a problem. Your Smoothing value is too high and this caused leaking. Set it to something like 1.. or even less. And then try to render, and it look much better.

 

Hey!

I wasn't moving my camera. The problem was in the sphere. If I use Unity Sphere, Earth is deformed. If I use any other sphere everything is OK. Low poly spheres are deforming videos.

 

Im trying to use Salsa lip sync with the VR Panororama pro. The only problem is that the audio plays way too fast during rendering, so when the video is played the talking animation is played too fast. Is there a way to fix this?

 

Hi. This is a problem that I can't solve as it would require putting my hands on Salsa code
You should probably ask Salsa developers for a support on how to sync Salsa to unity scaled time (timescale). I don't know if Salsa has some kind of baking down of lipsync movement into unity animation. If it has, then you should bake all movements into animation. But it probably uses realtime sound analysis.
You could try using this free asset, that can convert motions to animations. But I'm not sure if it supports blend shape animations and if you can make it work with Salsa. i don't own Salsa, so I don't know how it works.
https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/tools/animation/scene-motion-capture-19622

 

Strange. i don't think that this comes from VR Panorama. Are you using some image effects? Waht image effects are you using? It looks like there is some sort of AO (and even some sharpening) that isn't aligned well to an image.
Waht is your unity version and are you using a latest VR Panorama? As for darker scene, it shouldn't happen - VR Panorama captures pixels as they are. Be aware that some graphics cards treat differently gamma for 3D overlay (like unity) and differently for images preview. So,l if your card is set to wrong gamma for 3D, you can end with a wrong colors. Also, are you using linear or gamma lighting in Unity?
anyway, I have never seen anything like tchat happen in VR Panorama, so I have to guess that it's related to your project.

 

It is conflicting with an image effect. The Post Processing Stack v2 from unity is not rendering properly. I'm getting a much darker result when I use it. It looks like the contrast is much higher than it is set to.
https://github.com/Unity-Technologies/PostProcessing/wiki

 

It is being caused by the anti-aliasing in the Post Processing Stack. By turning that off it renders correctly. It still does seem to be loosing some of the vibrancy that is in the scene normally, but at least it's not mostly black anymore.

 

This was the response I got:
"SALSA does obey Unity's Time.timeScale, but the Unity AudioSource component playback does not. You can work around this by setting the AudioSource.pitch property to the same value as your Time.timeScale value."

I was then given this snippet of code:
Link in the AudioSource that's also referenced by Salsa3D, select a timeScale and check the set checkbox to activate the change. Obviously, replace the set with whatever logic you're using to set the timeScale.

Code (CSharp):
using UnityEngine;
public class TimeScale : MonoBehaviour
{
public AudioSource audioSrc;
[Range(0f, 2f)]
public float timeScale = 1f;
public bool set;
void Update ()
{
if (set)
{
Time.timeScale = timeScale;
audioSrc.pitch = timeScale;
set = false;
}
}
}​

I'm not sure exactly what they mean by "Whatever logic" I'm using. I'm a rookie with coding and unity, but as far as I can tell the timescale seems fine during playback, its only during rendering that it slows down. I'm not sure how to define that logic. Is this something you could point me in the right direction to? If so, I'm sure I wouldn't be the only one to benefit from it.
Thanks so much for your time! This plugin is an amazing thing!

 

Change a script to look like this:

Code (CSharp):

1. using UnityEngine;
2. public class TimeScale : MonoBehaviour
3. {
4. public AudioSource audioSrc;
5. void Update ()
6. {
7. audioSrc.pitch = Time.timeScale;
8. }
9. }

I'm not sure if this can work, but give it a try. If Salsa is using FFT analysis, this could be a problem as changing a pitch rate changes frequencies, and this would lead to false triggering (or no triggering).

 

Now If I turn timescale down manually in unity project settings it slows the sound and salsa down as well, but it is still not slowing down during rendering.
Suggestions?

 

I'm pretty out of solutions. It doesn't help not having Salsa to test something else. Did you try my advice on using Scene motion capture asset?
one question: what Unity version are you using? A new 2017.3 features animation capture functionality, and also, this one could probably work. But I think that trying to sync audio with video in rendering is pretty impossible. this is because of the way how unity treats audio, that somewhat works on a separate layer, and isn't actually frame dependent as are Unity scripts.

 

Hello,
I am having a problem with the 180 degrees option in VR Panorama.
On the stereo left view there is always a upper brighter area as shown on the attached image.
Capture type: Equidistant Stereo SBS and Equidistant Stereo
Capture angle: 180 .
I've create a Unity2017.2 empty project loading only VRPanorama asset and a Unity 5.6.3 empty project: there is always this brighter area on every scene.
There is no problem using 360 degrees as capture angle.
I'm using Windows 10 64 bit with a NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960.
Thank You and kind regards.

 

Please, send me in PM your Invoice number, and I will send you a version that corrects this bug.

 

Thank you, you have solved my problem!

 

I'm having an issue where both the top and bottom camera are ending up with ghosting in the image.

Here are my camera settings

 

Does this ahppen with image effects turned off?
I think that this is because you use Environment distance that is too short. I don't know a scale of your world, but distances that small should be avoided. also, if you are using HQ rendering mode, set Environment distance to something large as 100-500 - in some scenes it gives better result.
I also see a Capture Video script, what this script does???

 

I will try changing the environment distance and turning off the image effects. The capture script just sets up a few things in the scene for when I am capturing a video. Turns off my switch scene object and a couple things like that.

 

You shouldn't put any scripts of that kind on a camera, as thay will be duplicated inernaly - and this can lead to unpredictable behaviour. If it has to follow camera transform, then it should be attached to an empty parent object. Or refactored so that it stays outside of your camera object.

 

Hi-

We're having trouble setting up multilayered cameras with the realtime capture mode (VR Panorama RT). Only the last camera in our chain is rendering, which because it doesn't clear the screen has severe artefacts. Even a simple 2 camera setup where the first camera draws some background elements and the second camera draws some things on top does not work, the RT capture mode seems to only support a single camera.

Multiple cameras do work for standard animation capture though (as per the multilayered demonstration scene you have provided).

Is this a known restriction/limitation of the realtime capture mode?

 

It should work perfectly in realtime mode (even if it isn't my suggestion to do so - rendering to multiple cameras is never good for performance). Be sure that your cameras have Depth Only set to on. If you contact me with your invoice number, I can send you a newest version that has a demo of RT module doing this.

 

Does this support projects that are using OpenGL? I added it to my scene and it is only rendering the skybox.

 

Yes, it supports OpenGL. Does a demo scenes work for you? And also, what is yours Unity version?

 

HI.
I bought this asset. Its really great. However I am facing problem. I want to make video for Youtube in 4K. If I select square ratios like 2048x2048 or 4096x4096;it works fine. But for standard like 3840x2160, all the output images and video has little extra part on the right side. Please help. Attaching video and image. See the right side...that part seems like extra part.

 

Hello i am looking at your asset and wondering if it would suit my needs. I need to render 360 video in a app i am developing and wondering if this asset would do this. ?

Thanks

Daniel

 

hi, this shouldn't happen. are you sure that you arent using some kind of a script that forces resolutions or camera ratios? having scripts like that could interfere with VR Panorama by overriding VR panorama settings. does the demo scene works for you?

 

making videos from mobile devices isn't supported. this is because mobile devices doesn't have enough power to do something like this.

 

Hi guys, I bought the VRP some time ago and still using it, very good job! The best out there!

I having a big big problem right now with the actual project im working on.
My characters faces are based in blendshape, and the mouth movement in Lipsinc.
The system check the high and low levels of the audio to open and close the mouth.

When I record a video all the audio stop so my characters mouth movement stop either.

Any setting of patch to fix it?

thanks

 

This can't work out of box if a plugin analyses audio in realtime. This is because unity frame based rendering is separated from it's audio engine - it syncs only audio start positions, and samples aren't synced with frames . You will have to find a way to export those animations directly into a unity animation system or timeline. I don't know if your lipsyncing software featureas anything like that. You should probably ask a developer of lipsync plugin.