[RELEASED] VR Panorama - render 360 stereo videos

If it's done properly, I think it can work. There aren't any technical reasons why it couldn't be done

 

Hi olix4242. The asset seems pretty amazing. I am very new to Unity, mostly work in Sketchup.
I don't suppose you would be able to make a plugin like this for Sketchup? nothing currently exists and I am sure it would be very popular.

 

Hi, great asset.

I done a lot fo panorama, but now I came into a problem. There's a scene that when rendering a panorama comes out all black. I've done everything the same but the outcome is black. Don't know

 

Don't know without looking into a scene. Check out that you don't have set any antialiasing for forward rendering. Also, check "Use depth buffer". Are there any image effects that could mess with it? Try turning down all image effects and see if this still happens.

 

I'm not a frequent Sketchup user and I'm not sure that there would be much request. Also, Sketchup doesn't have a good rendering. I'm suggesting you to try to use unity. It's free and you can export everything quite easily from Sketchup into unity (with fbx export). And get better rendering outputs.

 

Hi,

I am interested in purchasing this asset for some stereoscopic 360 rendering. How can I view the FeatureTour.mp4 stereoscopic demo on my phone ? Its a top/down stereo video. What app can I view it in?

I want to get the feel of depth in the view !!!!!

 

Got it work ... Thanks for the amazing asset.

 

Great that yoi did it. May I ask what app did you use? (BTW, Sorry for a late response).

 

Hi.
I want to develop assets VRPanorama to record video from my game...

I want user can use it to record scene in game.

Can you guide me use your assets and make a button ?
When use click this button then program can auto render video.
How can I do that.
Please help me.
Thank alot.

 

For now, VR Panorama works only as an editor extension, and this means that you can't export directly video from a compiled player. This is mainly because this would be a really intensive task on a user side that would probably make your game unresponsive (blocked until it finishes rendering). Also, it would require a really fast computer, and a lot of HD space - and it would be to invasive for an end user/gamer. For this reason VR Panorama is a mainly tool for professional users that know exactly what they do, and not an in-game option for a average gamer.
Techincally, it can be done, but this isn't something that can be done without risk for a final user - because you can't never know on what system it will be done; You don't want to block a users PC for too long time; You don't wan't to fill his computer with gigabytes of images and videos.
Nevertheless, you can use a VRPanorama RT component for rendering out (on a screen) a 360 view and capture it with video capture cards with hardware encoding. Also, I see also this feature as a feature for a more experienced users.

 

I get an error in Unity 5, no panorama is rendered.

UnityException: Load is not allowed to be called from a MonoBehaviour constructor, call it in Awake or Start instead. Called from script 'VRPanoramaEditor' on game object ''.

 

Not sure what it's all about. Never had such message or problem. Does it happens always? Could you help me to narrow down this problem? What is your Unity 5 version?

 

I am running into the same issue with missing scripts in VR FPS Mover and VR Panorama Camera. I'm running Unity 5.3.2f1 Personal on Windows 10.

Have you figured out which scripts are missing? Thanks.

** SOLVED: ** In VRCompositor.cs line 7, change "VRCapture" to "VRCaptureRT":
[RequireComponent (typeof (VRCaptureRT))]

 

Then it looks that it wasn't the same problem. The one above was missing some standard unity scripts (that were not included, but can be imported with standard Characters asset).
Are you trying to work with VR Capture RT? For now I didn't had any betatesters for this component. Please, feel free to write me if you incounter any issues.

 

Hi

I have been testing the plugin and it has been really great!!

Then I ran it in my product scene and a lot of my geometry appears screwed up. Really screwed up!!

I have attached the camera to an empty and animated the empty as a fly thru.

I tested this as a 1080 video at 25fps.

I also get an error where it tells me that the camera is missing from the scene. Not bothered about this so much as I still get a vid at the end.

Any ideas?

thanks
Steve

 

What do you mean by screwed? Could you send me a screenshot?

This is normal behaviour. It is done because this way we can have a better performance (and save some VRAM) without rendering or blitting another time to a screen.

 

Hi olix4242,

I'm trying to render real-time to a Mosaic screen that is 8190x2160 (4x 2048x2190), but it seems that the output only renders on one (right) half of the screen. Can the source code be modified to support this larger resolution?

Thanks for any help you can offer.

Cheers,
- mars -

 

Hi, Yes, this can be done. And it doesn't require any coding.
You only have to modify prefabs for rendering. Prefabs to modify are placed in Assets/VRPanorama/Resources and have a name "360UnwrappedRT.prefab", "360UnwrappedRTmono.prefab" and "360UnwrappedRTSBS.prefab".
Every prefab is for a different type of output camera. If you are using 360 mono output, then you should modify only "360UnwrappedRTmono.prefab". (or "360UnwrappedRTSBS.prefab" if you are using side to side stereo renderingnso on)
You will see that this prefab contains one or more ortho cameras pointed to a plane "QuadL". This plane is where your panorama gets displayed. So, you will have to add to this prefab another 4 ortho cameras (deactivate camera component on existing PanoramaCamera object inside prefab) set to render on respective screens (Target Display - Display1, Display2 and so on... ) and position them correctly in respect to a "QuadL" plane object. You can create any mosaic formation (even with overlapping) in this way. Be sure to look at original camera component that you've disabled, and copy Culling Mask settings. Also, you will have to resize "QuadL" plane to meet your mosaic aspect ratio.
Not sure if my answer is clear, so if you get stuck, let me know.
Cheers!

 

I found the issue. It was a mesh I had in the scene. Rendered ok in the Unity editor etc but really screwed with the plugin.

Here is a screenshot.

So weird.

 

Yes, that's really weird. Does it use some strange shaders? This shouldn't happen. But maybe a shader isn't compatible with deffered lighting? But to me it looks like some kind of bug related to Render targets and render target size.
If you reimport mesh, does it changes? BTW, you are using standard video capture here and not panorama capture?

 

Also, if this problem persists, you can try to activate "Use Depth Buffer" in VR capture component. NOt sure if this has anything to do, but if there are some "strange" shaders, maybee it can help.

 

olix4242: thank you for the quick response - I'll dig into those prefabs and try to make those suggested updates; I'll come back here for more help if I get stuck - thanks again for the help.
- mars -

 

It's a least that I can do. But if you can wait a day or two I can send you a modified prefab. Yust tell me if you want to use stereo or mono panorama rendering.

 

Ok, I've modified a prefab for you assuming you want to render a mono 360. You can download it here:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/dzk9l4zcsalw59p/360UnwrappedRTMultiscreen.zip?dl=0

Rename original prefab, and then unzip a new one into your "Assets/VRPanorama/Resources" folder.
Here is also a video example of this one working in Unity.

 

Hi Olix4242,

I was wondering if the plugin works together with camera path animator 3.0. I created a walkthrough scene with the camera path animator 3.0 and i want to make it 360 degree with your plugin.

Does anybody have experience with both plugins working together?

 

Just create a VR PANORAMA CAMERA object as a child of your path camera and it will work

 

I got my 360 videos working on facebook and youtube. Thank you.

 

If you want, you can show us those videos

 

Oliver,
I see what you've done with the four cameras for four different screens; while that would work well if the system counted each screen as separate, the way our projection system is set up we're using NVidia's Mosaic multi-display utility that combines the four screens (they are actually projectors with fish eye lenses) to look like one single screen that is 8190 wide and 2160 wide. So when I run the Unity game, the resolution dialog will have two options: Display 1 (1920x1200) or Display 2 (8190x2160) where Display 1 is the monitor for the operator/user, and Display 2 is the projections system.

You mentioned the "QuadL" plane that the cameras are projected on - I can't seem to find this plane and in the code VRCaptureRT (it's commented out). Would the solution be to increase the width of the texture where you combine the six textures from the cube cams to accommodate the unusually wide aspect ratio of 8190x2160?

** UPDATE 1 **
Reverting back to the original version of 360UnwrappedRTMono.prefab, if you create a new fixed resolution for the Game view of "8190x2160" you will see that there are black bars on the left and right of the render - how do I get the final render to unwrap from the cube and stretch across the entire 8190 width?


** UPDATE 2 **
I found that if I changed the scale of the PanoramaCamera of 360UnwrappedRTmono to X=2.15, I get the appropriate stretch across the wide aspect ratio display. I'll try this out on the projector system tomorrow to see if this works.


Thanks,
- mars -

 

Yes, changing camera scale should work in your case. A good idea for a next version will be to implement custom aspect ratios and I will do it asap.

 

Hi.

I am having some success with the rendering now. Testing on YT.

My gear aint the best - 560 TI with 1GB. But I want to output the best quality I can.

I attempted 4K and my card crashed. Understandably.

I will need to bake lighting to lightmaps, I suppose this will help?

I can get my card chugging along at around 3072 resolution. Will this be fine with YT? I looked at what they think is optimum and 4k is what they like.

Any tips on get out the best quality YT vid on mid-range gear would be ace!!!

I know you have a VRAM optimization coming soon - is that any time in the next few days?? Haha. Wishing thinking. Also when I render I now the screen renders too - it once had "no camera can be found". How do I turn screen rendering off to save VRAM?

Thanks again for a great plug-in!!

Steve

 

I'm afraid that you can't do performant and hi-quality 4k renderings on 1giga GFX card. This is simply a hardware limit and there isn't anything that can be done. 4k renderings simply require much of VRAM for their graphic buffers and if your card can't allocate that amount of VRAM, you will get a bad performance (or crashes). Fro a normal performance, You need at least a GFX card that is compatible with VR (Oculus DK1 level) and that can handle 4k video.
You can always try to optimise things with baking, or by using lo quality render (and adding Screenspace antialiasing).

I think it could work fine if viewed on computer screen. If you can pull it trough (and this depends mostly if you use realtime shadows and how manu image effects do you use).

 

Hi there - thanks for creating this tool, I'm finding it very useful.
A few questions though (maybe features for a revised version if not available?)
Can I/I'd love to see...
1. The ability to render any resolution.
2. Have the save to folder allow to browse and see directories
3. Open destination folder doesn't seem to open any folder???
4. And most of all I'd love to see a preview (not sure this is possible) in the game window before rendering.
Cheers,
Dave

 

Thanks for your feedback!

This isn't possible for now without slowing down rendering (and you would agree that . Unity gives us a support only for cubemaps that have a size that is power of two with a limit of max 8192 x 8192. But MP4 video codecs doesn't support sizes that are larger of 4096 (and actually, I don't know if there are any codecs that support them). Final size could be hacked by rendering larger power of two size, and then shrinkink it down, but this wouldn't be an optimal situation.

I personally don't prefer this solution, as it would make things more complicated (more clicks, creating folders, keeping tracks of them, problems with authorisations and so on) espettially for a first time or a frequent user. As a frequent user, I personally wouldn't prefer a solution like this as I think it's better to have everything project related in a same project folder. But then again, if there are enough requests I can add this thing as an option.

It should open a directory if you have rendered your sequence. If you havent rendered it yet, than it won't open it (because a folder is created only on sequence render).

It is possible, but it will result in a slower rendering. I will probably add this feature as an option for a next release (together with some visual statistics about rendering).

 

@olix4242 this plugin is exactly what i needed for a client demo. Worth the money, very professional setup.
Some people had the same problem as I did in this thread, and I can confirm that it looked like absolute crap on youtube until I did a 4096 video and pumped it up to 20000 bitrate.

Question for you: If i want to path through a scene like in some of your videos...am I missing something or is that impossible to do at the speed it runs during capture? Is it effective to record a camera path?

Question 2: Tried to parse this whole thread and failed so maybe i missed it. On mac, you can't convert from the plugin? I ended up with ffmpeg because the resolution crashed quicktime7.

 

Hi Oli, I am going to buy this asset to make VR application that see inside the room at several location, however I wonder how to view that VR 360 image right inside the unity (after render complete) is your plugin support this already.

 

Depends of how you do a path for your camera. Best way is to use Animator component and animate your camera as any object in unity. If you use third party scripts for path cameras, they should support unity tile.timescale. If they don't, you should contact a developer of that path script. Also, if you are using something other than animator, you should animate a camera that is a child of VRCamera (or a camera that holds VR Capture component). Newer add any scripts that chande transformation to camera that holds VR Capture component. Instead add it to a parent object.

Yes you should be able to convert with a plugin. It uses FFmpeg to convert, and it already provides FFmpeg for doing this. On mac, FFmpeg won't show you a process indicator as on windows, so you have to look into your processes and see if it gets executed. As I know, for now, at this moment there are no problems with OSX and compression. But, it depends on OSX updates, and there were some problems after some OSX updates and broken ffmpeg. In that case, yust download a new compatible version of ffmpeg and overwrite the version that comes with VRPanorama. (in a folder Assets/VRPanorama/External
Sorry, but I don't use a mac, so for me it's quite hard to track all issues for OSX. But if it doesn't work, contact me privately, and we can try some solutions and track a problem.
Also, I've noticed that usually, files at 4k mp4 won't play on OSX (with quicktime). But they will work without problems on youtube on other devices. Hope this helps, and please, let me know if your problems persist or if you were able to solve them.

 

No, you can't view them inside unity at this moment. This is because unity doesn't support hi-quality video playback.

 

Hi Oli

I have just purchased your asset. Unfortunately I don't have much experience with making films / animation so this may be a very basic question!
I have set my camera on an animated flythrough using animator. The sample was set to 60FPS and the total length of my animation is about 7mins. I tried to render at 60FPS but Unity crashed, so I guess it couldn't handle that or my computer couldn't. Can I render at 25FPS or 30FPS and then edit the length in movie maker or some similar program?
I don't want to have to move all my key frames to fit into 7mins in 25FPS. Does any of this make sense??!

 

Hi Oli

I have got it to render at 60FPS. Thank you for such a great product. I haven't tried to load it to Youtube yet and get it viewing in Google Cardboard! so I might have issues with that, but I have read through the earlier posts, where you helped others to do it, so hopefully i will get it sorted out.
I would still like your advice on my issue with trying to change the animation from 60FPS to 30FPS or lower, but to keep the time running at around 7mins or so.

 

whenever i try to render a panorama, I get REALLY strange results like the one shown in this image. Please help.

 

Hi Oli. I thought I had rendered my project in 60FPS but it doesn't do the whole animation. It stops halfway and says room any threads. I am trying to start from where it left of, but I think I will need to change to 30FPS.

 

Sorry, that was meant to say *Too many threads running!

 

Hello Oli,

We are using VRPanorama for our project and it works great. But I have a few questions about the capture type.

I know pretty much nothing about videos and I have to do a 360 video and a 360 3D video. Could you help me with the settings I should use for it?

Is it Mono for 360 and stereo for 360 3D?

Thank you!

 

Hi Oli
İ purchased your asset and it was great and usefull but then a problem just occured.When I hit "render panorama" I only get the .png/.jpg pictures, there is no encoding to a movie. Also when I hit 'encode H.246 video from existing sequence' nothing happens. Weird thing is i had managed to get videos many times but it s just stoped showing up in "destination folder", there are just png./jpg. pics.
My system is Win10 64bit, AMD radeon R9 200 series, Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-4790K
Why do you thing it happend?

 

Sorry I didn't respond earlier. For some reason I didn't saw any notifications about activity here.

Strange. This doesn't look like a problem on plugin side, but something else (some image effects or some scripts).

You don't have to use same samples as in animation. You can render at any FPS even if your samples in animation have different FPS.

Yes. Stereo is a correct name for it even if stereoscopy is ussually marketed as 3D. For best quality on Youtube you will want to use a MilkVR setting and set Quality VS. Speed to 16.

 

It's impossible to tell what is happening from this screenshot. I) need some more info on how do you use it (screenshots from editor, inspector and hierarchy view).
Also, befor that try to enable "Use Depth Buffer". Let me know if it works for you.

 

Strange. I suggest you to reimport VR Panorama package from assetstore (sometimes unity corrupts installation for unknown reason).
Also, be sure that you didn't move or rename VRPanorama folder or other folders inside.

 

Does this version support Automatic 360 panorama metatagging for Youtube H.264 Video Export now?

 

Not yet. For now this function is on standby as I'm working on some other performance improvements. New version in work will have some 10 to 15 % of speed gain (this depends heavily on cases). Also, a new and better interface is coming. Nee version will feature also a possibility to be used from player and not only from editor.