ICVFX At Home 1 - SteamVR and LiveLink
Since moving to Seattle and not having access to the XR studio at LSU, I've decided to build my own at home. This first post will cover setting up Unreal 5 and getting camera tracking started. It’s a lot, so I will cover physical lighting, lens calibration and studio considerations in a future post.
For this home setup in my tiny attic spare room, I used the following components:
Built Gaming PC - Ryzen 9 and RTX 3080
HTC Vive Lighthouses and V3 Tracker puck
Sony A73 - Set to 1/60 fps
ElGato HD60+ capture card with pass-through HDMI
55in 4k TV capable of 60hz - this will be good enough to check our work
Spare desktop monitor for reviewing in-camera view; can be replaced with an on-camera monitor
TLDR: as you can see from the parallax on our mini “video wall”, we have live camera tracking! …and a lazy actor.
Setting up SteamVR
We will be using an HTC Vive and SteamVR since we are sticking to a consumer-grade budget for this mockup. It’s a tried and true system that’s been used in indie virtual production for years (Shout out to Matt Workman’s videos when I was getting started in 2020!). This is a freshVive setup so we need to run through the SteamVR room setup and place lighthouses first. Only the area that the camera is traveling within needs lighthouse coverage, not necessarily the entire room. Once the room is set and tracker is identified, we can put aside the controllers and headset.
Unreal Engine 5.1 LiveLink
Moving on to UE5.1, we have converted the Arch Vis Interior demo project from 4.27 and will use it as our workspace. We will also need some plugins to receive our Vive data. I am using the “LiveLink” and “LiveLinkXR” plugins for my previous green screen VP projects and this XR demo.
After restarting the project, we add the LiveLink window to our workspace and click “+ Source” to add a “LiveLinkXR” tracker. If SteamVR is running, the tracker should automatically be recognized and give you a green dot next to it’s name in the LiveLink window.
That’s it for a basic tracking setup! Be aware that this will still need fine tuning, lens alignment and focus tracking, but we are ready to setup our nDisplay environment in the next step.