I would love for us to move past the idea that non-pinhole projections have "distortion", and we should strive to remove this "distortion" by reprojecting stuff to pinhole models. In practice, ALL projections distort straight lines and/or shapes and/or sizes, so if you use the pinhole projection everywhere, your images look like crap (see iphone wide-lens camera output for instance). Most of the normal non-pinhole projection functions work fine for wide lenses, while behaving like a pinhole lens with long lenses: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fisheye_lens#Mapping_function
Weird that UE also implements this as purely postprocessing filter. Surely there is more efficient way to render directly using panini projection, or at least something closer to it? Could you do it in vertex shader or something
jsheard 9 minutes ago [-]
You could do it in the vertex shader, but all of the geometry would have to be very finely tessellated for the curve to look right since each individual triangle would still have straight edges. Alternatively you could raytrace the camera rays, which makes it trivial to use any projection, but that's a non-trivial departure from how most engines operate. Post-process is the simplest and most universal way to do it.
pyrolistical 32 minutes ago [-]
I find it funny people play on the highest fov in first person shooters to their own detriment.
They think the higher fov is a pure win as it allows them to see more but in reality it is a tradeoff making targets in front of them smaller.
5G_activated 9 minutes ago [-]
there is a long standing problem in Team Fortress 2 where the default FOV is 75, as it was on the console ports of the Orange Box, and it's believed to turn off a lot of new players and enrage regulars because they just don't see things in the periphery that everyone else playing at the maximum FOV of 90 does.
shannifin 36 minutes ago [-]
Nice! I wanted to do this sort of thing when I was playing around with 3D game programming in the late 90s / early 2000s, to capture how a wider FOV looks in movies. Alas, computers were too slow and I was too inexperienced anyway.
Rendered at 21:56:12 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
https://dev.epicgames.com/documentation/en-us/unreal-engine/...
Very few games seem to use it or any other alternative projection though.
HYPER DEMON may be the best known exception.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ScglDSi9KUs
They think the higher fov is a pure win as it allows them to see more but in reality it is a tradeoff making targets in front of them smaller.