[RELEASED] VR Panorama - render 360 stereo videos

Hi,
how are you animating your BK color? If you are using animator, this won't work as it won't be applied to camera. You have to think on how VRPanorama renders things in 360:
-it disables your main camera
-duplicates multiple copies of original camera with all scripts attached
-parents those cameras to orignal camera
-removes animator component on duplicated cameras (so that they move based on root camera)
-stitches those separate shots into 360
From this, it is apparent that any animation other than transform will be lost in this process

Workaround:
1) script your background color and add this script to your camera (so that it gets duplicated with camera)
2) or ad an inverted sphere around your scene filled with solid color - and animate this color.

 

Hi Oliver,
im going to test the lightshaft asset, but mu current project as aura built in it. Do you know a sollution? the script above doesn't work.

https://github.com/raphael-ernaelsten/Aura
https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/vfx/shaders/aura-volumetric-lighting-111664


test so far with your the 360 renderer;

i really love the extra`s this asset has merge video and inject spatial data... a joy to work with

 

I just just added "Volumetric Fog & Mist" to your VR Panoramic Camera, but the fog does not render. Could you please explain how I can get it to show up in the rendered VR video stills please?

 

Volumetric Fog should work. But be sure to add some other image effect (like Post Processing) after Volumetric Fog. This should force the update of VF.

 

I will try to investigate this issue.

 

Ok! I have done some investigation and unfortunately, I can say that it doesn't work. It seems that Aura is messing up camera transforms, but it isn't easy to understand what and how it does. It simply changes orientation and transform of virtual cameras that are created by VR Panorama. And this makes it impossible for me to put my hands on a code and see what really happens. Not to speak about correcting whole code of Aura. Sorry

 

Thank you, it worked after applying image effects.

One thing which is puzzling me is, I attached an animation pathe to the VR Panoramic camera, but it only renders the first frame, but does so for the whole animation, 6,000 frames. I tested different settings, mono, SBS etc, but it does not return the animated stills, only the first frame, rendered 6,000 times. What am I missing?

 

Hi,
What is animation path? You aren't using unity mecanim animator?
In a case that you use some path animation system, be sure that your VR Panoramic camera is set as a child of an animated object, and don't apply it directly on a camera.

 

Thanks!
I will try a different method...
G.

 

Thank you Oli!
I used the second method with the inverted sphere and it worked successfully!

Now after rendering I discovered another (minor) problem, but I'm not sure if it's related to VR Panorama.
Objects in the bottom or top area of the equirectangular video appear somewhat distorted

Here's a fish on the bottom of the frame. Some of the outlines look as they were duplicated, which they aren't (Screenshot from Premiere Pro's VR-preview mode).


And here's the same fish in the middle of the frame, appearing as sharp as the footage is intended (the difference in opacity is not part of the problem).


Now I believe this could be related to the framerate. My Unity Scene is in 60 fps, but in VR Panorama I rendered this in 30 fps. The other settings are 8K stereoscopic top-bottom, but I already checked that it's not related to stereoscopy, because the blurry objects appear both in the left and right eye parts.

 

Hello OliVR,

I have used your asset to render multiple scenes and I had no problems, however, I am currently finding a bug when trying to render in both Stereo and Mono on a particular scene.

It seems that the camera is capturing a double image on the corner. and makes the stitching go off.

Whats odd is that I been using the renderer in the same project for different scenes, but in this particular scene it seems to be going off.

I might have something in my settings that is making this bug happen, but whats weird is that when I test the VR Panorama camera on VRPanoramaRT mode, the problem does not show.

Please find attached a screenshot of my current settings and a still image I got from some experiments.

Do you have any idea how to fix this bug, or what it might be?

 

Heya, i'm trying to render out a project in unity 2018.2.0b5, unfortunately even in an empty scene the plug in crashes after at least trying 2 frames but no errors. any ideas where the problem might start?

cheers,

Graham

 

I am using unity 2017.3.1p2 and no matter what settings I use or check or uncheck it will only render the JPG or PNG images out but never encode a video after the images are rendered out even though I checked the box for Encode H.264 video after rendering. Did I miss a step to do before all this? All I did was import the package from the asset store and add the VR Capture script to the camera with these settings. Any help is appreciated and def needed.

 

I'm having an issue where I'm unable to add the "VRCapture" script to my camera. I'm getting an error from Unity saying I need to fix compiler errors before I can add it, but I haven't made any changes to the script since downloading the package. Any idea how to find and fix the errors?

 

Hi! ... Sorry for my late response...we never actually resolved this... Here is an image. There is a flat blob shaped mesh with the FX/Glass/Stained BumpDistort shader. it has the normal map and texture you can see below. This works great in the exe... but has this black outline when i try to make the VR panorama... I tried disabling "Use Depth Buffer" - i'm using JPEG quality 60... Speed vs Quality is 18. There are no post processing effects on the camera.

Any clues gratefully received!

 

Hello! I actually have another issue while I'm here (!) ... It seems to be skipping some images when it creates the image sequence. Just a few but it means that the ffmpeg command fails, and when it fails the command prompt just vanishes and gives you no clue as to why it didn't create the full movie. I ended up screen recording to catch the error before the ffmpeg window vanished and it was down to a missing image in the sequence. I get around it by duplicating the previous image and giving it the right name & sequence number... but i may have to do it 4 or 5 times to finally get the mp4 out... Any ideas how to stop this happening ? Thanks!

 

So I figured it out you can't have resume from frame any other number then 0. Anything after that and it will still render the images just fine but won't make a video no matter what you do. Is this a bug or how the system works?

So I figured let the scene run first then check the VR Pano system to work when you want it to is the only way to let the scene go for a bit then make it work as you want.

 

Does anyone know if this works in latest unity 2018 version?

 

it hasn't anything to do with VRPanorama - you probably have some other script that is generating error. Check your scripts and find the one that is doing so.

 

Have no idea. I would need some more information. Probably a bug in Unity beta version.

 

It is a feature. It is intended for resuming unfinished renders.
If you want to start capturing from another frame, disable VRcapture script, and enable it on desired time.

 

It was tested in latest Final versions. Not tested in beta versions.

 

Strange. This shouldn't happen (never had this issue). Could be some sort of a bug in Unity or a hardware issue (hard disk that doesn't work correctly).

 

Ok thanks... hmm i'm on Unity 2017.3.1 but it happens on my work computer and my one at home so i guess it's not hardware... i'm going to assume it's something in the project / Unity version and just deal with it by writing a little script that finds all the holes in the sequence.
It actually appears to happen at moments of very high processor load... i have different areas in the experience and as i switch over to a new area a lot of gameobjects are turned on and preform their initialisations... it's at these times that the frames appear to be lost.

 

Me again(!) .... So, another issue has cropped up. We\re using the latest VideoPlayer from Unity 2017 onwards... and the playback speed is coming back way too fast in the created 360 video. You know of any workaround for that? I can't just set the playback speed to something rough like 0.3 because the video is related to a translation in the 3D space and it needs to be precise...

 

You should attach a script to your video. It can be found in Tools folder. It is called SyncVideo.be sure that your video has a same framerate as in VR panorama settings.

 

Hello!

I think your asset is really cool. But I'm having some issues... I'm using a simple shader+code to blend 2 materials over time. But 360 capture seems to break the shader. Just for video capture (meaning not 360) it renders fine, but in 360 it seems like the material becomes transparent/disappears partially. I've attached images as well as capture of the shader/code. I'm still a newbie student so have limited knowledge of coding etc. What am I doing wrong? please help!

(This is how the image should look)


(This is how it looks in 360 render



(shader)

(code) to blend the 2

 

Would someone here mind giving some suggestions of rendering to Youtube 360 video?

I'm using the YouTube 8k prefab settings, for a resolution of 7860*4320 , but I noticed elsewhere that others recommend using a 2:1 ration. Is one preferred?

Thank you,
Nathan

 

This resolution is the one recommended by Youtube. (actually, 7680 and not 7860, but I immagine that this was a typo

 

Hard to know without knowing unity version. Unfortunately, some transparent shaders can bug sometimes. Actually, for some reason they don't render into a render texture. Best way to go around this issue is to add some simple post processing effect to your camera. This will usually force correct rendering order.

 

Hi! Thanks for the quick response! well I think I actually fixed the problem by doubling up the mesh . I have no idea why/how that works but hey I'll take it. But I'll try to add some post processing as well & see what that does.

 

So tried playing around with post processing a bit. But my main problem now (since the blending material seems to be fixed) is that the leaves on the trees look black in 360 rendering? I tried changing the lighting, etc but it doesn't seem to help. What could be causing this?

 

Hey, I want to make still images with your plugin and save them as JPG, this works great in the Unity Editor, but when I make a build of the scene, the programm shots a panorama image only one time, after that it doesn't react to the trigger button. My Unity version is 2017.4.5f1.

 

Thank you very much for creating the VR Panorama asset. I am using it to create a short film rendered in both 2D and 360 at 24fps. The ease of integration with Cinemachine and Timeline has been very useful, but I've run into a few issues that I hope you can assist me with.

Issue #1 - Child objects appear to render a frame later than the parent.
I have a rigged, animated character that sometime wears glasses, so I've put the glasses as a child of the character. In Game mode, the glasses move around in sync with the rest of the character, but when I render with VR Panorama, the glasses render 1 frame late, so it looks like the glasses motion is lagging behind the character.
I've tried setting the Cinemachine Brain Update Method to "Late Update" with no effect.

Issue #2 - Depth of Field
When using DOF with the Cinemachine Post Processing stack v2, the DOF is not rendering properly with VR Panorama. Of course I am only using DOF on the 2D video render, but there's no obvious way to fix this. In an earlier post you suggested using the VR Panorama RT script. This improved the DOF rendering, but the overall quality of the render was terrible. Is there a way to increase the quality settings of the RT render? I'm trying to render at 3840x2160.

Issue #3 - Video Player rendering is inconsistent
A few scenes use the Video Player component to show MP4s. They playback fine in Game Mode, but when rendering with VR Panorama they will occasionally skip frames or freeze.

 

Hi,

VR Panorama 360 pro is a great asset. I tried it with unity 2017 without any issue but in version 2018.2.0f2 it makes unity quit all the time. Even with a brand new simple project. Any solution or feedback from other users would be appreciated.

Thank you!

 

Hi,

Thanks for such a well-polished, and well-thought-out plugin. We've just started using this and it's working very well for our purposes.

I have a small issue with some lines showing up on the floor right underneath the camera. I did a quick search about this in the thread but didn't come up with anything, so forgive me if this has been asked and answered elsewhere.

Here's a video where you can see this problem. If you rotate the camera towards the floor you can see 4 lines forming a square around the base of the camera, as well as some minor white artifacts that show up. The 4 lines show up both when the camera is stationary or moving. Any suggestions on how to fix this would be appreciated!

Thanks in advance

 

Hi, I have a doubt, how to render a still image from another script on runtime and not from a key of the keyboard, I tried with SaveScreenshot(); but that doesn't work

 

hi, i have been using it since the first release, but in the last unity 2018.2 it has a big bug that close unity every time , tried using LW renderer , HDR renderer , and STANDARD renderer , and in all cases is this error, there is something or a work arround the we an do to make the capture work ? and another question is if it would be an update to support the new renderers HDR and LW ? thanks

 

I am in the same boat. I posted the problem a week ago. Desparately need v2018 ...

 

I have to say sorry to everyone that wrote here. But unfortunately, forum isn't giving me anymore notifications on updates on this thread

 

YesterdayI came across this issue while working on SRP support (HDRP and LW), and made some changes to scripts. Still not sure why it doesn't work anymore in Unity 2018.2, as it worked before. But apparently, Unity doesn't let me discard textures anymore by using a script. Now the problem is solved.
Just download a unity package that you can find here:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/uzfqpm2e9dv6nox/2018HDRP_Support_Fix.unitypackage?dl=0
Open it and overwrite old files.
This should add a support for HDRP, LW SRP and fix issues of Unity 2018.2 crashes.
Please, let me know that it works (or doesn't).

 

Book of the Dead scene rendered woth new HDRP support:

 

You should check Render Queue of your materials. Render Queue is introduced lately in Unity, and some older shaders doesn't interpret those values correctly.

 

This is a bug in Unity and incorrectly set character hierarchies. You have to check that all your skin parts have a same root (character root).

 

Not sure what you mean by this. I can assume that you get a smaller DOF. This is because DOF works at pixel level, and not on real physical level of lenses. So, as you go higher with a resolution, you get a sharper image.

 

Check the patch that I've posted above.

 

Sorry, I don't know why, but I cant see your video

 

You should look into a VRCapture.CS script, and search for
if (Input.GetKeyDown(captureKey)
You can add any condition that you want in this place.

 

Unfortunately, this can happen, but it actually isn't connected directly to VRPanorama. It might be a codec related to video texture problem. I suggest you to try some other codecs/resolutions, and this usually helps.

 

Thanks for the response. Unfortunately setting the skin parts to the same root didn't work for me, but I was able to work around this issue by rendering at double the frame rate. My animation frame rate in Unity is 24 fps, so I rendered with VR Panorama Pro at 48 fps and converted back to 24fps in my video editor. It didn't fix the lag perfectly, but it reduced the amount of lag to a more acceptable level.