360 Video Capture Settings

Hi, I know this slated to be on 4.9 but I’m looking to make a 360 video capture from inside UE4. I’ve managed to setup a 6-camera capture cube that renders out video for each side but i’m having quite a bit of trouble stitching it back together. Are there any settings, specifically video resolution, FOV and Aspect Ratio that I should be aware of to achieve this? When I plug the reference frames into image stitching software I get image vomit lol…please help anyone?

What is your method for the video capture? Are you using multiple SceneCapture2D? Are you rendering all 6 cameras at the same time, or one by one on a set path?

I don’t have an answer, but the same issue. Autopano gives me headaches in how it’s interpretating the images. I only have images, with a 1:1 AR and FOV of 90°.

I found a solution thanks to help Rich at Hammerhead VR. Below worked for me, started with 6 cameras upped it to 18 for the best result in combination with Autopano Video:
120 fov should work.

In order to achieve the desired result we will need to create a template stitch since our standard ue4 scene isn’t detailed enough for the automatic algorhythmns to work. I’m afraid I’ve lost the screenshots of this but I’ll try to explain it and find an example image on Google.

Essentially what we want is a perfect stitch from ue4 using the exact same camera setup used in our matinee and to splice that footage into the first few frames of each matching video.

The only way I’ve been able to do this thus far is to create a cube with inverted normals or BSP and apply a unique, high fidelity photograph to each face. Then to capture the matinees (just a few frames) This will mean that the autopano / video stitch algorithms will be able to recreate the image. Splice those frames into the beginning of each video. And stitch from that frame, this will mean that the remainder of the footage in your video will be perfectly stitched without any extra work. This process is repeatable as well, once you have your template frames you can use them over and over again on new shots. You may like to label each face of the cube with a number in order to keep track of which is which, which way is up and down, orientation ect. I had to create a cardboard net out of a cereal box, number the sides and keep it on my desk in order to keep track of how my cube was arranged.

Please see attached for image examples of a cube room and a HDR image used as a texture in that room.

When working with 360 video in real life, people generally download a template stitch for their 360 hero rig or freedom 360 go pro rig in order to speed up processing or solve any technical challenges. Since we don’t have a standard rig it won’t work for us, but the benefit is that we can place an infinite amount of cameras on the exact same pixel so there should be less ghosting but of course each video will increase rendering time and workload. This is already an incredibly labour intensive process so be careful. I think this technique will work best on static images since when the camera moves there is a higher chance of seams. You should also be aware of automatic exposure control on your ue4 cameras since this will effect the continuity of your footage between the individual shots. One problem you’ll run into is with 6 cameras you may not have enough shots with overlap to create a completely smooth stitch. The best way to get around this is to put a fish-eye warp on your lens. You could either create this as a post process on-camera effect or reverse engineer the oculus integration. When rendering in matinee for some reason the renderer takes a little while to spin up and produce high quality footage. It will be difficult to render each video individually this way and make them sync up, so instead we should sequence each camera in the director group and then split apart the JPEG frames into folders. Be aware, sometimes matinee loses frames for no reason so it’s more tricky / slower for us to import them into premiere as a frame sequence.

is there a tutorial or project I can download and view please?? So I can look at with this functionality.

It’s good