Helios 3D-360 Video

Community Showcases
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Now part of the unity VR Essentials, Helios is a 3D/360 video capture plugin for Unity that allows you to capture stunning recordings from the Unity editor in popular 3D formats such as Equirectangular and Stereographic projection. It will create videos you can directly up load to popular sites like YouTube and Facebook in native 360 format.

IF YOU NEED SUPPORT:
Please do not leave a message here on the Forum, as Unity does not notify me about them.
Instead, please join me on my Skype Support group, with over 70 Members, you will get direct realtime support there first: https://join.skype.com/dixRfDRa6MI7

Check out the website: www.helios3dvideo.com

Helios is available on the asset store here: LINK

Also, please take a look at Pegasus by Adam Goodrich.
Helios is a fantastic recording suite, but Pegasus is the counterpart for perfect camera movement.

Here are some preview movies:

Helios is packed full of amazing features that make it a very easy to use and highly productive tool.

Features:
-Capture video in 480, 720,1080, 4K and 8K cinematic aspect ratios
-Record at 9,15, 24, 25, 30 and 60 FPS
-Supports Stereoscopic 360
-Automatically encode MP4 video
-Automatically creates High Quality Animated GIFs
-Automatically adds 360 spatial metadata to videos
-Support realtime audio recordings
-Videos compatible with Oculus Headsets
-Videos compatible with Vive Headsets
-Videos compatible with Google Cardboard
-Videos compatible with Web Browser and Mobile phone 360 video players
-Traditional 2D camera rig included
-Support Equirectangular videos
-Support Stereographic (little planet) videos
-Record specified frames in a range
-Hotkey Recording
-Session recorder to record live player movement for later recording
-Built in antialiasing
-Custom super fast shaders
-JPEG and PNG image support
-2D and 3D demo scenes included
-Full source code included
-Multithreading
-Works in Deferred and Forward rendering
-Designed from the ground up to be compatible with Pegasus by Adam Goodrich

Though Helios is an Offline Rendering system which has a focus on High resolution and high frame rate, it does come with a session recording system that you can record camera movement data in normal speed which is played back at render time.

Unity 5.4 Beta Compatibility
Presently, Helios is compatible with the Unity 5.4 beta 21, but not with previous versions

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Give us more info already!!! :slight_smile: it’s been an hour…
Can be promising depending on these info. Feed us or is it a guess game?
Render 360 images for VR, has some sort of a compiler to render to videos??? Would be awesome. Looking forward to knowing more about it.

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Oh sorry, I was actually just making a forum post to link up in the asset help files.

Here is the TLDR:
Install Helios
Drop Helios Prefab in your scene
Use the Helios Macro recorder to record a camera/character movement track (Optional).
Run Helios and it will read your movement track and export a collection of equirectangular image files (full reversed cubemap sphere/3D/360. etc…)
Click the Make Video button and get a free MP4 file ( with YouTube/Facebook spatial metadata)
Upload your videos .

Make up to 4K 60FPS 3D video files.

Helios is an offline rendering engine with more attention focused on image quality and steady framerate.
This is why the macro recorder is nice because you can record at normal gameplay speed in the editor, and get the exact movement in the video.

Realtime audio is included.

I still have an open beta if you would like to play with it :slight_smile:

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I think, I’d rather let someone who has the time to play with it and gives good accurate feedback have that beta access. I’d rather pay for a nice finished product. I’m all over my Gear VR these days, really thinking about projects to do… here again don’t have time… but I’m totally inspired when I see tools like these.
Keep it up. Definitely look promising. Thanks for giving more info.

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Haha, yeah
I’m close to the initial release, but then again Im always close :slight_smile:

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Quick question, lets say i have a 3Rd person project, can I record the 360 video while playing at run time inside the editor?

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Yup!
There are actually a few options here.
You can :
-attach the Helios rig to your character at an offset
-attach the Helios rig to an Orbit script that will follow your character
-use the built in Helios Controller and just manually follow your character around
-use the built in Helios Controller as well as the built in Session Recorder and record a movement track

  • leave the Helios Rig stationary but in a place within the scene that has a full view of verything
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Awesome. Thanks.

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Or,
attach the rig to Curvy, Cinema Director, Simple Waypoint System, Or a forthcoming product from another asset developer which I promised I will not discuss :slight_smile:

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What kind of compression does happen when creating the Mpeg4 Video? Can you specify it? Will you support some external other codecs? ( dvx, avi, etc…)

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Helios creates a stream of still images which are then sent to FFMPG.
Being that there are only a handful of venues which support 3D embedded video playback at the moment (YouTube, Facebook, GoProx website) I don’t see much need(at the moment) for other codecs.

Specifically, I format the videos to standard 16:9 aspect ratios when I send them to FFMPEG.
The user is allowed to specify the Framerate, Scale, Clip Length, Audio Source

HOWEVER
If you dont want to use FFMPEG, you can just take the collection of stills and push them to whatever local video editing tool you have installed (Premier Pro, After Effects, etc…)
and export it however you like.

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This is looking great. VR is the future, man. The combination of audio and video make this infinitely more usable than the other solutions I’ve tried.

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I’ve been helping to test this with the plans of using it to help showcase some packs that I’m working on. I will hopefully have some videos to share here soon once I figure out what I’m doing. Getting close, but not close enough to avoid embarrassing myself publicly. :stuck_out_tongue:

But so far, all of the problems I have had with testing have been things that I have done wrong and John quickly straightened me out. Oh, there were a couple of bugs we found and helped squash. But I’d say 90%+ of what was available when I started helping John test was already pretty solid.

Great job putting together another great asset, John!

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Great work so far John, ツ

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Very cool.

Does it allow:

  1. 8 and 16k offline resolution render?
  2. Adjustable jpeg / png quality settings? (Let’s say we create a long 360 pan and want to not overfill harddrive - as 16k pan can be like 500mb bitmap / frame - we’re hoping jpeg could be about 6-10mb / frame)
  3. What settings do you recommend in ffmeg?

Thanks!

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For right now, the max is 4K recording (which is offline as well).
I’m experimenting with some new shader ideas to get up to that resolution, but this version is 4K max.

The PNG and JPEG encoding is the default Unity settings, so PNG is Unity’s default, JPEG allows you to specify quality.

As far as use of FFMPEG, thats a really broad question, can you narrow that down for me?

Thanks,

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Yay!

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congrats! :slight_smile:

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Nice work! I’m using the free CapturePanorama for the time being (as it does any resolution), but looking forward to updates from you :slight_smile:

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Version 1.0.1 is being submitted this weekend with the following changes:

  1. Fixed an issue with paths and scene names with spaces in them
  2. Added support for a new Remote Control recording system where other assets can tell Helios when to record
  3. Added a new beta tool to let you record many different objects in the session recorder including animation state.
  4. Misc bug fixes
  5. Removed documentation from the package and linked to the website for the latest docs http://www.helios3dvideo.com
1 Like