When we introduced Unreal Engine integration back in 2018, we were blown away by the endless possibilities this combination gives you. It combines the beauty and performance of Unreal Engine real-time rendering with LightAct’s media server functionalities.
A large majority of projects using Unreal Engine & LightAct are projection mapping projects (you can have a look at some of them in our showcase).
In all of these projects, the content flow is this:
- LightAct takes all the incoming information and passes the data to Unreal Engine.
- Unreal Engine takes the data and renders the content. Then it sends it back to LightAct using Spout.
- LightAct grabs Unreal content, applies all the required warping & blending and pushes it to projectors.
While this pipeline works well, we found that there is one drawback:Â sending of the content from Unreal back to LightAct consumes a significant amount of computer resources and adds a few frames of latency.Â
So we thought: “Wouldn’t it be great if our users could push the content to projectors straight from Unreal Engine if they wanted?”.
That’s why we are very happy to introduce UnrealLink – a new feature in LightAct 3.6.0.
UnrealLink allows you to create nDisplay configuration files from LightAct. The files include the information about all the projectors, their intrinsic and extrinsic properties, their blend masks, their mapping to physical outputs as well as the IP address of the servers.
The UnrealLink workflow is very simple:
- import the 3D model of the projection object into LightAct. The location, rotation and scale of the model should match the one you’ve got in Unreal Engine.
- Calibrate and blend the projectors in LightAct using 3DCal or CamCal.
- Create nDisplay configuration files with UnrealLink.
- Use nDisplay Launcher to launch your packaged game using these configuration files.
UnrealLink does not replace the traditional workflow where you stream the content back to LightAct. In fact, in some cases you will still want to stream the content back to LightAct.
