Stereo 3D Camera Rig in Unreal Engine!

hey guys this is Alex Pierce from lightsallvr.com in this video we're going to be looking at how to create a stereo 3D camera rig and render it out of unreal I only know of one plug-in that sort of works with stereo 3D and it's confusing it crashes it uses things like render textures and it just doesn't quite work as well as I hope so I did a bunch of research and came up with my own way if you know a better way please let me know in the comments but let's just jump in and I'll show you how to do it and I'll explain things as I go along instead of telling you up front so the first thing we're going to do is we're going to right click go to blueprint class and then search for cine camera and just make a cine camera actor select this we're going to call this BP underscore we'll call it stereo cam parent and then I'm going to right click and I'm going to make another one same thing sending camera sitting camera actor select we'll call this BP stereo cam we'll say master so let's go ahead and drag in the parent and let's set this to zero zero zero and then we're going to drag in the master we're going to set this to zero zero zero and this master we're going to call master underscore L for Left Eye drag in another one we're going to call this master underscore R for right and then I'm going to make sure to put this zero zero zero these are both zero zero zero four so for the left eye we're going to go to the Y and we're going to set it to minus 3.15 for the right eye we're going to go to 3.5 no excuse me 3.15 basically what we're doing is we're offsetting the cameras by 63 millimeters unreal is in centimeters so 63 centimeters is 6. or 63 millimeters is 6.3 centimeters so we're just offsetting it to the left and to the right and we're going to select both of these and then drag them underneath the parent so you have the parent and then you have the left and the right so now if I want to move this camera rig I select the parent I can drag it around I can also pilot it so let's go into here always pilot the parent not the left or the right so I can pilot this to wherever I want it and now if I click on camera left you can see my left camera and my right camera It's probably hard to see in the screen recording but if you look at this little ear right here you can see that we see a little bit more of it in our right eye than we do our left so that looks correct you can see we have three cameras on top of each other and what you don't want to do is accidentally select and move one of these so if I was in the viewport and I selected one it's grabbed the left eye and now if I move this by accident you can see now our offset is not right so I can control Z to get out of that so what I want to do here is I want to go to the master blueprint open this up and I'm going to search for mesh and so this camera mesh right here you can just click this and press clear compile and Save and now we just have the one camera so now we can only accidentally select the parent camera why did we create a blueprint called Master why did we why didn't we just bring in a cine camera actor from here and then just do two of those and bring them in well I'm glad you asked the main reason we set these cameras up as one blueprint is both the left camera and the right camera are the same come from the same blueprint so let's say we wanted to change the focal length instead of changing it in the details panel so if you come down here and we have the left eye selected for instance if I change anything here so if I go to let's just change this to a 30 millimeter now our left eye is a different focal length in our right eye and that is not good so let me go back here undo that so basically you don't want to change anything in the outliner for the lens settings for these left and right eyes you can for the parent the parent is basically just for reference it doesn't really matter what this is but for the left and right eyes this you want to change any settings in the actual blueprint so you can click here to open up the blueprint and now if we want to let's say we want to change the the lens to a 50 millimeter so let me do this so you can see what we're looking at here so now if I select this left eye I'll go ahead and pin it so you can see what the lens looks like here if we're in our so in our blueprint here if we select let's say we change this to an 85 you can see that it updated our our lens settings and of course it updated for both eyes so that's that's good that's what we want so that goes that's true for everything if you want to for instance change your focus to be on this monkey let's do tracking and we'll set this to the monkey basically these settings should always always match some things though you won't want to change from the left and right eyes in the blueprint you'll actually want the parent to to change so for instance anything that deals with transform or rotation you always want to change the parent not the left and right eyes for instance if I wanted to track this monkey for instance with my stereo rig I would not want to do that from the cameras because they would crisscross potentially I would want to do that from the actual parent in the details panel or in sequencer Etc so let's go ahead and look at sequencer now so let me go ahead and add a level sequence I'm going to call this shot underscore tutorial and I'm going to put this in my stereo tutorial that's fine so now to render these eyes out left and right what we're going to do is let's say we want to add some animation too because I'll make this a little bit more difficult for the tutorial sake so let's go ahead and drag in our parent into sequencer so for the parent we want to adjust our transform so if we go ahead and we are right now we are piloting the parent so I'm going to go ahead and add a transform keyframe here and then let's say back here at frame 148 I want to be here go ahead and add another transform key so let's just double check that looks good so our parent is making this movement but we want to render our left and right eyes right so let me go ahead and drag in my left camera okay at the top here it may be hard to see it but at the top here you can see it's the camera Cuts track shows that the parent this is all the parents so I'm going to go back to the beginning of the timeline here and under camera Cuts I'm going to go camera binding and go to left so now I can see that this is the left camera that's being rendered out and that looks correct so now what I'm going to do is I'm going to go back to my content browser I'm going to save this I'm actually going to rename this to be underscore L for left and then I'm going to right click duplicate I'm going to set this to right let me right click on this we can take out the camera Master l and bring in the master r down here same thing for my camera Cuts choose the right camera now that looks correct go ahead and Save and now to render you can just go up to movie render queue and I'm going to go ahead and delete these render called this shot tutorial l and shot tutorial R you can put any presets you have for right now for this test this is fine so I'm just going to go ahead and press render local and we have this beautiful amazing animation here so now we have our left and our right eyes rendered out separately now you can combine this in whatever program you want to combine them in for me I'm going to combine them in simulate scratch or live effects because I don't actually have to transcode anything I can actually play back the left eye and the right eye at the same time from the jpeg sequence top over bottom and review it without having to transcode it to make it over under or side by side any of that stuff so anyway hopefully this tutorial was helpful let me know if you have any questions and I'll see in the next one

Channel: Alex Pearce

Views: 4,767

Keywords: 3d, unreal, virtual production, stereo, stereoscopic, stereoscopy

Id: IF3rzvqeJZ4

Length: 10min 17sec (617 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 14 2023