All Things 3D | "Welcome Back" After 1 Year Perseverance & Ingenuity Unite Back at Octavia Butler Landing Site VR180 @allthings3d | Uploaded 2 years ago | Updated 21 hours ago
NOTE: This video uses a new technique to render stereo 180 from the Unreal Engine by choosing to render from a 2D capture probe instead of Omni (cube) capture probe. By pushing the FOV to 110-130 and then using Adobe After Effect to map it to a half sphere you can effectively provide VR180 video that envelops the entire FOV of your VR headset. In this example I used an FOV of 110, which is little more than the Meta Quest 2, providing a immersive "picture box" experience. I can see this technique being used in standard filming without too much trouble with 25mm prime lens on two cameras. Or even converting "3D" formatted 21:9 ratio movies to full immersive experiences.
To celebrate the the one year anniversary of Perseverance and Ingenuity coming back together today (not quite this close though), I created this little VR180 with AmbiX audio to showcase the latest features in Unreal 5.0 based on one of the more recent builds of 'UE5 Main'. It takes advantage of Lumen GI & Reflectivity as well as some features from 4.26+ like Render Queue and 2D Capture. The latter uses a novel method of allowing over/under stereo capture by using a Cinema Camera instead of the older technique of using an orthographic camera; which not only allows for more control in the visual appearance, but also allows Render Queue to be used providing faster rendering and more important, the ability to improve anti-aliasing (at the expense of performance) for a better image quality. What is important in this method, is was able to use the standard 2D plane instead of a stereo omni capture to capture a 110 degrees of 'panini' correct FOV, that was later converted to an equirectangular in Adobe After Effect. This is notable since one can basically use any camera to capture and FOV of 100-130 which is about the limits of most VR HMDs to provide a very immersive experience without having to resort to slower, less effective methods to derive perspective correct stereo "3D" output. Now the goal is to provide stereo paired output without having to resort to 3D capture process, which sadly is not much better than cube capture by capturing the output from VR camera instead.
Sadly, the Motion Blur effect seems to suffer, as can be seen in almost no blur in the props, yet more at ground level the frame rate appears more realistic. Something I will have to spend more time with in the future.
The mars environment is based on images from MRO HiRISE, Ingenuity Mastcam-Z & Navigation cameras to create an HDRI environment, two levels of terrain mesh, landscape mesh & the actual landing site terrain based on photogrammetry. This not only provides the most detail at inches from the surface, but provides smooth transition from the surface to 10 meters (and higher) for first lift off of Ingenuity from either FPV eyes of Ingenuity's RTE camera or the MastcamZ stereo cameras, including a zoom feature. More to come in the next month at:
https://ingenuity-vr.space
NOTE: This video uses a new technique to render stereo 180 from the Unreal Engine by choosing to render from a 2D capture probe instead of Omni (cube) capture probe. By pushing the FOV to 110-130 and then using Adobe After Effect to map it to a half sphere you can effectively provide VR180 video that envelops the entire FOV of your VR headset. In this example I used an FOV of 110, which is little more than the Meta Quest 2, providing a immersive "picture box" experience. I can see this technique being used in standard filming without too much trouble with 25mm prime lens on two cameras. Or even converting "3D" formatted 21:9 ratio movies to full immersive experiences.
To celebrate the the one year anniversary of Perseverance and Ingenuity coming back together today (not quite this close though), I created this little VR180 with AmbiX audio to showcase the latest features in Unreal 5.0 based on one of the more recent builds of 'UE5 Main'. It takes advantage of Lumen GI & Reflectivity as well as some features from 4.26+ like Render Queue and 2D Capture. The latter uses a novel method of allowing over/under stereo capture by using a Cinema Camera instead of the older technique of using an orthographic camera; which not only allows for more control in the visual appearance, but also allows Render Queue to be used providing faster rendering and more important, the ability to improve anti-aliasing (at the expense of performance) for a better image quality. What is important in this method, is was able to use the standard 2D plane instead of a stereo omni capture to capture a 110 degrees of 'panini' correct FOV, that was later converted to an equirectangular in Adobe After Effect. This is notable since one can basically use any camera to capture and FOV of 100-130 which is about the limits of most VR HMDs to provide a very immersive experience without having to resort to slower, less effective methods to derive perspective correct stereo "3D" output. Now the goal is to provide stereo paired output without having to resort to 3D capture process, which sadly is not much better than cube capture by capturing the output from VR camera instead.
Sadly, the Motion Blur effect seems to suffer, as can be seen in almost no blur in the props, yet more at ground level the frame rate appears more realistic. Something I will have to spend more time with in the future.
The mars environment is based on images from MRO HiRISE, Ingenuity Mastcam-Z & Navigation cameras to create an HDRI environment, two levels of terrain mesh, landscape mesh & the actual landing site terrain based on photogrammetry. This not only provides the most detail at inches from the surface, but provides smooth transition from the surface to 10 meters (and higher) for first lift off of Ingenuity from either FPV eyes of Ingenuity's RTE camera or the MastcamZ stereo cameras, including a zoom feature. More to come in the next month at:
https://ingenuity-vr.space
