OWL Screen Capture

An integration of Windows Screen and Window Capture into Unreal Engine to capture your Monitor or any desktop Window direct as a Render Target

Last updated 3 days ago

Overview

The OWL Screen Capture Actor let's you capture your Monitor or any Desktop Window direct into Unreal Engine as a Render Target.

It works with multiple Monitors and Windows.
It includes cursor capture.
It will only work on the machine that Unreal Editor or your project/ game is installed to.

The OWL Screen Capture uses texture sharing so will have little to no impact on your Unreal Engine frame rate.
It is 8bit color only.
It will respect the frame rate of your input source but if this is very high or the input source is very high resolution Unreal will start to struggle.
You can capture multiple simultaneous inputs but if you run many at the same time Unreal may start to struggle since it has to render them all in your scene.
We recommend to use it in combination with the Unreal Media Plate to have exact color replication of your input source and no ghosting/ blurred images.
You can set this up automatically through our Media Input Wizard.

Drag-and-drop the OWL Screen Capture Actor into your scene and go to its Details panel:
You can select between Monitor and Window Capture and you need to select or create a Render Target to write the pixels to.
If you select Monitor Capture you will have a list of the Monitors connected to your GPU:
If you select Window Capture you will have a list of the Windows active on your Desktop:
Select Active to switch the capture on
Select Capture Cursor if you want you cursor to show in the capture.

The Screen Capture is generally reliable without many issues.
If you have many different Windows on your machine and you close windows while they are being captured you may create ‘ghost’ entries in the windows list.