OWL Viewport Capture

A method to capture the active Unreal Engine Viewport to a Render Target which works in Editor and in Packages games/ apps and can be used with media output for streaming or recording the Viewport.

Last updated 3 days ago

Overview

  • The OWL Viewport Capture is a simple but effective way to capture your active Unreal Engine Viewport to a Render Target which can be very useful for streaming or recording your project or game-play.

  • You can also select to capture any HUD or Burn-In you have added to the Viewport.

  • The capture will just follow whatever active Viewport you have selected in your Unreal Editor or game/ app.

Performance

  • The Viewport Capture is highly performant because it doesn’t render any additional pixels, it just writes to the Render Target whatever your Viewport is already rendering.

  • You can output any color space that the Viewport can support (up to 32bit) but this will be limited by the color space that your media output supports.

  • It doesn’t support alpha channel.

  • You can use DLSS/ Upsampling to further increase frame rate if you need, meaning you can get up to +200FPS.

Set-Up and Features

  1. Go to Place Actors and in the Off World Live panel select OWL Viewport Capture and drag and drop it into your level:

  2. In it's Details panel, you can change these features:

    1. Texture Target: This is where you set a Render Target to capture the Viewport.

    2. Pause Rendering: You can tick this if you want to stop the Render Target from capturing.

    3. Capture Widgets: This is for packaged projects/ apps and if ticked it will capture any HUD you have set up for your Viewport as well as the gameplay.

    4. Fix Gamma: This ensures that your output colors are the same as those you see in Editor. If you want the raw color values then untick this box.

  3. The Viewport Capture will always capture whatever active Viewport you have selected in Editor (or in game):

  4. Whatever you select you will see automatically appear in your Render Target:

Trouble-Shooting

  • The Viewport Capture will work automatically without issue.

  • In packaged projects/ apps the Render Target will automatically set to the Resolution that the Viewport initially opens to.

    • You need to set a Blueprint to resize the Render Target to whatever Resolution the user eventually selects if you are giving them the option to record or stream from the project/ game so that the output Resolution is the same as what they have selected.