nDisplay Config
The heart of how the multi view system works in Unreal is through a plugin called nDisplay.
Step 1.
|BTS
|
First we need a 3-D representation of our wall in exact dimesions. Download the static mesh LSU_LED_Wall.FBX.
Step 2.
|BTS
|
Drag the fbx you downloaded above into the Stages folder. Turn off Generate Missing Collision and accept all the other default settings for importing FBXs. Press the Import All button to import the static mesh of the LSU LED volume.
Step 3.
|BTS
|
It also imported an unneeded Material do you can right click and select Force Delete.
Step 4.
|BTS
|
Open up the static mesh and it is an exact replica of our screen. It contains two sets of UV's. UV0 is just a 0 to 1 UV with the entire area filed. The UV1 has our 6 x 14 grid of screens with the exact ratio of the wall.
Step 5.
|BTS
|
The only change we need to make to this static mesh is to set Use Full Precision UVs to true
. This uses greater floating point accuracy when calculating the UV's (I believe).
Step 8.
|BTS
|
It's useful to note that we have poistioned the pivot of the Wall Mesh exactly 12ft (365.76cm) out from the screen. This pivot represents the origin of our scene as well as our camera tracking.
Step 9.
|BTS
|
Select the Stages folder. Press the green Add button and add a nDisplay | nDisplay Config file to the folder. Call this file LSUnDisplayConfig
.
Step 10.
|BTS
|
Delete the nDisplayScreen component as we will not need it.
Step 11.
|BTS
|
Open up the LSUnDisplayConfig file. Press the green Add Component button and a Static Mesh component and call it LSU_LED_WALL
.
Step 12.
|BTS
|
Rotate the mesh so it is in the front of the stage. The letters should be right side up if we are looking at the screen. If you click on the Default View you should have the X axis (red arrow) pointing at the screen. In our case we had to rotate the mesh by 90°
.
Step 13.
|BTS
|
Now zero out the Transform | Location on the static mesh for the screen and the screen does not start on the floor. It is 12.9
cm off of the floor. We need to adjust the Transform | Location | Z (+Z is facing up) by 12.90
units (1 unit is 1 cm in Unreal by default).
Step 14.
|BTS
|
Since our resolution is less than a 4K screen we can use a single cluster node to power the screen. Right click on Cluster and select Add New Cluster Node.
Step 15.
|BTS
|
You can leave the the node named Node_0). Make sure the Parent is set Cluster. Choose the QHD (2,560 x 1,440) Preset. That is the size of the entire frame going from Unreal to the Brompton. The game only uses a part of it as the screens don't have this many pixels. The ROE panels are pixels 176 pixels square per panel. We have a grid of 14 tiles wide by 6 tiles tall, thus giving us a resolution of 2464 x 1056, which nestles into the QHD preset. The IP of our main machine is 130.39.93.72
. Enable Sound and enable Full Screen. Press the Add key.
Step 16.
|BTS
|
Select the viewport, likely called VP_0
, under the Cluster panel. In the Details panel change View Origin to DefaultViewPoint
and Type to Mesh
. Select the LED_LSU_WALL
mesh. Now the screen is a grid of 6 x 14 monitors that are 176 pixels square. So our horizontal resolution in the wall is 14 * 176 = 2464 and vertical resolution is 6 * 176 = 1056. So change the Region | Size to 2464
by 1056
.
Step 17.
|BTS
|
Press the Add + component button and add an ICVFX Camera
. This is now adding an inner frustum camera to the scene. Now you can move the ICVFX camera around and the frustum should move as well.
Step 18.
|BTS
|
Open up the Scenes | Main level. Remove the static mesh of the LED wall and replace it with the Drag and drop the LSUnDisplayConfig into the scene. Make sure the X, Y, Z are all at 0
as we don't want to alter the ground height and put it in the center of the world for now. The setup can be moved to wherever in a future level you want to place it. But we want the Actor ground level to be 0
, which is what we calibrated our camera to be starting at on Z.
Add CineCamera actor to our Main level. Call it Red Komodo
.
Step 19.
|BTS
|
Place the Red Komodo cine camera actor in World Outliner as a child of LSUnDisplayConfig. This way when we move the entire panel the cine camera moves with it. Make sure the CineCamera is at 0,0,0
in both Transform | Locations and Transform | Rotation so we do not offset it. The position will be given to the camera by the OptiTrack system.
Step 20.
|BTS
|
Go to the LSUnDisplayConfig and click on the ICVX Camera component and set the reference to the above Red Komodo camera. Press Compile and Save.
Step 21.
|BTS
|
Now go to the Main level and select the LSUnDisplayConfig in game and click on the ICVFX camera and make sure the Red Komodo is set as the camera there as well (it should have done this at compile time above).
Step 22.
|BTS
|
The camera preview frame gets in the way of our scene. Lets turn this off. Go to Edit | Editor Preferences and go to Level Editor - Viewports | Look and Feel and turn off Preview Select Cameras.
Adjust the camera settings. Our Red Komodo has a Sensor Width of 27.03
mm, a Sensor Height of 14.26
mm when shooting at 6K (6244 x 3250).
It's useful to note that that if the camera is set to UHD (16:9 instead of 17:9) our sensor size is 26.63 x 14.98 mm
. You can use these calculators to determine proportion of the sensor being used for given resolutions: https://www.scantips.com/lights/cropfactor3.html.
The current lens on the camera today is a Canon EF 16mm - 35mm 2.8. These values need to change for each lens. It has a Min Focal Length of 16.0
mm, a Max Focal Length of 35
mm, a MinFStop of 2.8
, a Max FStop of 22.6
and a Diaphragm Blade Count of 8
.