Welcome back to another Unreal Tips & Tricks video.
Today, we will take a look on how
to set up a panoramic capture inside Unreal.
As the version 4.23, the Panoramic Capture tool
now supports multiple buffer outputs
such as AO, Base Color, Metallic, Roughness,
Scene Depth, and World Normals.
The settings are all driven in the Blueprints editor
and comprehensive for the users to modify,
which we will be covering in this video.
OK, I have my project open in Unreal.
And I'll start by enabling the tool in the Plugins content.
So let's go to our Settings in the top bar
and click on the Plugins.
Make sure you're on the Built-in features and search for Pano.
And this is the tool we're going to be using.
So make sure to enable that, and restart the editor.
Back in the project and my plugin loaded,
we need to look for the Panoramic Capture Content
folder.
So make sure to enable Show Engine Content and Show Plugin
Content in the View options before searching.
With these two enabled, we can go into our project folder
and search for Pano.
And let's open the Panoramic Capture Content folder
and then, the Assets folder.
We can see a Blueprint Actor.
Before we start using our actor, and to make the best
use of our Pano Capture, we need to disable the effects that
are screen-based, such as Camera-facing Particles, Light
Shafts, or Vignetting, that would
create undesirable effects in our render.
In this example, for instance, I've removed any god rays
coming from the window as well as screen-space reflections
and any ray-tracing features, since this is not
supported yet.
All right, let's drag the Blueprint Actor into the scene,
and let's open the Blueprint editor.
So if I go into my Details panel and click Edit Blueprint,
I can open the Blueprint editor.
And this gives me access to some settings for our Panoramic
Capture render.
Let's start by the output directory in which
the capture will be saved.
By default, it is saved on your C drive.
I'll leave it as is, but you can specify a custom folder
if needed.
The next node is the Resolution Output.
It is set to 6k, but let's change that to 1024 for now,
just to speed up our capture process.
Higher values increase significantly the capturing.
So let's enter that number for now,
and we can always change it later on.
The following settings enable you
to tweak how many slices you want per image
and set the number of degrees per horizontal step
or vertical step.
We will keep these as defaults as they work well.
But you are free to change these settings to your need.
And follow the link in the description
for more information.
Moving on to the render passes, as mentioned earlier,
we now have access to extra passes
for our capture, which will allow users some more
control on compositing.
I'm going to go ahead and enable AO and Roughness in this case.
So I'm going to go to my Ambient Occlusion node
and set 1 instead of 0.
And I'll do the same for the Roughness node.
Moving on to the Output Bitdepth,
a value of 8 translates to a 8-bit format saved in PNG.
We will use that for now.
But you can enter value of 32, which translates to a 32-bit
image and will be saved in a .exr format.
For the next node, we will decide whether we should
use monoscopic or stereoscopic.
We will cover the stereoscopic mode with the 360 movie
in a second part of the video.
So make sure to enter 1 for the monoscopic view.
On the final node, we can decide if we want
a single frame or a 360 movie.
Let's break the node, since we don't want this
to trigger immediately on Play.
We want to place our camera first in Play mode
and then capture the panorama shot.
We can enter this command later in the console command.
OK, back in the scene, let's go into the Play mode.
But make sure to enable Game Mode in the override
in your World Settings.
Let's go ahead and press Play, and let's
navigate in our scene.
And here is a good place for our 360 pano.
So let's open the Console command
by pressing the tilde key and type in sp.panoscreenshots.
This is going to capture the panoramic screenshot.
All we have to do is press Enter.
Project will freeze for a few moments
as it's capturing our pano shot and stitching
the images together.
Once the capture finished, let's head to our directory,
open the folder, and we can see that we
have our three passes there.
So we have the AO pass which rendered out correctly.
We have our Final Color pass.
And we have our Roughness pass.
I hope you enjoyed this first part of the tips and tricks.
And see you in the second part to cover the 360 stereoscopic
camera render.