So glad to see that virtual production is expending! Cant wait your future vids. Also, since you are owning htc and bliss trackers, it would be cool to make comparison video with pros and cons. Thanks!
Regarding comparing HTC Vive and Bliss. If you look at my older videos you can see how the VIVE performs. The main issue with the vive is that the tracking has objectional jitter for many people depending on your room setup and how you use it. The Bliss doesn't have this jitter. Also the Bliss requires very little setup with no base stations to hang in the room. This lets you use the Bliss almost anywhere, including outdoors. However it does need to have stationary objects in view to lock onto, so you might have some trouble outside on a windy day when everything is being blown around in the wind. The main advantage of the VIVE is it can track other objects besides the camera. You can have up to 10 trackers on various objects in the room allowing you to use it as a budget motion capture system or just to measure the position of other objects for setup. You can see in some of my videos where I have a vive controller shoot out a lightsaber-like beam. I've also attached a tracker to my head and had other characters in the scene look at me automatically.
The sliding isn't due to tracking, it comes from not having the offset between the tracker and main camera's nodal point calibrated exactly. It's a paralax error. It is very hard to get this perfect by hand but there are some new tools coming out that can solve that, I'll be reporting on them when they are available. First one is the lens calibrator that's in Unreal, but it only works with certain types of tracking systems right now.
Thank you for discovering VP hardware alternatives and demoing them in budget setup's Greg. I hope you start posting in the new Unreal Community learning portal as well. Cheers, b
@@GregCorson Yes things have changed from the UE learning portal days. They opened it up to everyone and the community is so much better for it. There is now even a button to get started with your own training content. I think your channel over there would be terrific.
The various markers and checkerboards you see scattered around aren't actually used in the production of this scene or the camera tracking. Those markers and all the other "real" objects you see in the video are there simply because they were laying around in my studio and didn't seem out of place in the scene. For example the mailing tube on the floor, the hard drive dock under the flatscreen monitor and some of the items on the table like the cup, the Kratos action figure and the car detailing brush. If you look closely there is even a gopro underwater enclosure and a box full of headphone eartips. I thought about removing them and making the background totally virtual, but everything seemed to fit together so well I decided to keep them. This is the same reason I let you see the ACTUAL door and hallway into this room, it just looked right. That being said, you do use Aruco markers for scene setup and camera calibration. Right now I am only using marker functions that are built into my various tools, I haven't tried to write any C++ code or Unreal blueprints that use them directly. I'm planning on doing this eventually, but it may be a bit before I figure it out as the Unreal Engine functions for using them are not really documented.
Ah I see, many manufacturers of motion controlled gear have plugins in the unreal marketplace, you should check there first if you haven't already. If your crane already outputs it's encoders through serial or some other method, you can probably read them from inside an unreal project using a blueprint or C++ code. If you can give me some more details on what rig you have and how you can connect a computer to it, I may be able to give you some more direction on how to make it work.
Really appreciate your channel and tutorials. You've talked me into a recent ReTracker Bliss unit purchase. I'm excited to get everything set up. I'm assuming I'll probably have to purchase a cable for the bliss? I forgot to ask Marwan about that. Do you use the mount that came with the bliss? Cheers and Happy Holidays, Greg.
Yes, you normally will need to get a cable the bliss just comes with a short one. Unless your sensor will be under about 6 feet away, some kind of active powered USB extension cable is best. Some computers also have power issues with their USB ports, they are supposed to provide enough power but I have run into several motherboards that do not (like mine) I ended up putting a powered USB 3.2 hub on my computer which provided power to the cable and bliss. For longer distances or wireless convenience, some people put a mini-pc on their camera rig and connect back to their virtual production PC by WiFi or wired ethernet. I do use the mount that came with the bliss, my camera is mounted in a SmallRig cage which has a handle on the top. I attach the Bliss to that handle so it hangs out over the lens I usually use, giving it a good view of the room without the camera and lens getting in the way.
@@GregCorson Thanks for the reply, Greg. At the moment, I’m looking at the Asus TUF GAMING X570-PLUS (WI-FI) ATX AM4 Motherboard. Is there something specific I should be looking at within the specs to make sure that I do not have power issues? Thanks again.
It's hard to say. The USB spec tells how much power a port should deliver, but as I and others have found out, sometimes the ports on PCs don't deliver full power or have a maximum power they can deliver to all ports simultaneously. USB hubs seem to be a bit easier to predict because you can look at the power supply they come with to see how many total amps/watts they supply. All this is really difficult to predict if you are using long cables because they all have unknown losses when transmitting power over a distance. Probably the best insurance is to have an extension cable that you can attach power to at the distant (camera) end. Plugging in a powered USB hub at the distant end could also ease problems. I don't think it's worth worrying too much about the motherboard end as nobody really gives detailed USB power specs for those. Just make sure you have enough USB 3, 3.1 or 3.2 ports to hook everything up. The final solution will depend on how long a cable you need to reach the tracker. You may want to check the RETracker discord to see the solutions and cables other people have used.
@@GregCorson Any idea how I can get rid of warping and slight jumping around the edges when I move my camera? I just posted a comment within the Bliss discord as well about this. Thanks again.
The only real requirement on the camera is that you like the way the video from it looks and that you have a way to connect it to your computer. If you go back to the early videos in my channel, some were made with a webcam. Better cameras and other gear just tend to make the process a bit easier and more flexible. You can use whatever kind of camera that gives you the look you want your final video to have.
this is just plain, fucking wizardry!!! how did u did any of this, I need to know. The while thing looks amazing! im ashamed of my n00bness… but SO RDY for a tutorial.
Unreal Engine is a 3d game engine. This is used to render the background scene you see in the video. To put it simply, all the green stuff in the video is removed and replaced by the 3d background. It's a bit like cutting a picture of a person out of a magazine and pasting them on top of another picture. If you want to see more about how it's done, just go to my channel and watch some of the other videos there. Those tutorials show how it was done with an earlier version of Unreal Engine. The tutorial I'm working on will show the setup for the latest version of Unreal Engine which can produce realistic looking scenes much easier. It's possible to do stuff like this with any good gaming PC and a camera, even a webcam.
The Intel T265 and the Bliss are very similar devices that track using stereo cameras. The main difference is that the Bliss is newer technology and much more accurate. All the Bliss cameras are higher resolution than the T265. Also the Bliss has software support for virtual production from Rassi Engineering and a fairly good sized community using it. The T265 has limited software and your pretty much on your own getting it to work. Also I think Intel has stopped making the T265.
I'm not sure what you mean, it looks like the chair is remaining in the same spot to me. What timecode in the video did you notice a problem. Maybe I'm missing it?
@@GregCorson between 5:14 and 5:18 there is a slight movement on the chair with respect to the floor it is noticeable though, is there any good budget tracker?
Ok, I'm still not certain which glitch you mean. If you look at the white paper on the left you can see it drifting with respect to the power strip. This is very small and probably due to a minor calibration error. I think about at the point you mention, the whole background seems to jump a bit. This is most likely either a brief tracking glitch or possibly my unreal renderer dropped a frame for some reason. The latest version of the bliss tracker has a lot of improvements to tracking that reduce these kinds of glitches. As far as budget tracking, it depends on what you mean by "budget". I would say the bliss is the only tracker under $5000 that is worth it right now, and lately they have special pricing plans for indie/education that will bring the price down. The VIVE is the only other thing that is close, but it still has a lot of issues that make it much harder to use. I would only use the VIVE stuff if you happen to already own a set. If your project can be done with fixed camera shots, there is a fast way to align the shots that does not require a tracker see this tutorial ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-v1qKwRsil-Q.htmlsi=kL6k_lf3wQVhBK5n This will align up the cg and real cameras letting you get a lot of different camera angles quickly. You just can't move the camera while recording.
Hello Greg, I am about to purchase the REtracker Bliss, but first I wanted to know the opinion of any user who uses it. Do you have the Indie license or the regular REtracker Bliss license? I am considering it to use it with led screen nDisplay ICVFX (not with a chroma)
Hi, I use bliss with a greenscreen setup and like it very much, I know others are using it with LED wall. Since I worked with the RETracker folks to create it, they gave me a full license. I understand the main difference with the Indie license is the lack of hands on video chat support. The only real issue I can think of with LED wall is that REtracker requires something stationary to track, so if you have a large wall, ceiling and floor that moves or uses a very large frustrum you might have minor issues. Usually RETracker can track whatever stationary practical elements you have in your set. It's also possible to point it at the ceiling, floor or to the side if facing directly towards the LED wall has issues. You can also place tracking markers (pieces of paper with high contrast patterns printed on them) in places the Bliss can see but that are out of shot for your main camera. For example at the top of the background screen or on the ceiling or floor.
@@GregCorson Thanks for the response Greg!, thanks for all the information, it is very valuable to have the opinion of someone who uses it and real cases. Could you give me the contact of someone who uses it with an LED screen? to ask you some questions
I can't think of anyone specific that is using REtracker with LED screen, suggest you ask Marwan Rassi at www.retracker.co/ for some references near you.
I am only using the keyer that is built into Unreal Engine. It is actually not very good. If you notice in the video there is nothing else in the live scene that is even remotely green and the green screen is quite bright while everything else is fairly dark. This makes the key easier to do. Also, the overall dark-and-moody look of the scene helps to hide any problems with the key.
@@GregCorson ahh i guess the darker background does help. I've been using the OBS + Offworld camera toolkit to do keying with a custom shader shared on the obs forum to do the keying but its still very dependent on the source camera being noise free to get a good real-time key.
Yes, the darker lighting does help. Also I have a green panel light behind the chair I'm sitting in to help make the green screen more saturated and remove shadows. Still not a perfect key but with a darker set it looks pretty decent.
For full disclosure, I was given the Bliss to try out. There is no sponsorship and no money has changed hands. Previously I was using the VIVE VR trackers which had a lot of problems. Bliss has been easier to use so I'll keep using it. I've been helping them to make improvements and have written a LiveLink driver for it. I wrote the driver mainly to learn how to do it. I've released the source code for that LiveLink driver to help other people learn how to make one for their own projects.
@@GregCorson thanks for the answer. I was also using the Vive Trackers and had sooo many problems with them. In the end I wasn't able to achieve production - ready camera tracking. :((( I'm gonna shoot them a message. Maybe they're up for a sponsoring.
Aximmetry is nice, adds some features and has a good keyer. But for these tutorials I'm trying to focus on using software that is available for free (without watermarks) so anyone including schools and individuals can use it. All the software I've used here is free and will run on any gaming PC. Some of the hardware costs, but if you don't want camera tracking it's possible to do all this with just a webcam and PC. The quality won't be as high, but you can do it.
