Capturing Images and Video

1Capturing images

This tutorial assumes that you have already installed the Cesium for Omniverse extension and opened NVIDIA Omniverse USD Composer (formerly Create) with the Fabric Scene Delegate settings enabled. If you have not yet done this, see the Quickstart for detailed instructions.

1Open your USD from the Lighting the Stage tutorial, or open /tutorials/02_lighting_the_stage/02_lighting_the_stage.usda from the Cesium for Omniverse samples. You should see Cesium World Terrain along with Aerometrex San Francisco Photogrammetry.

2You can simply capture the viewport as it is by clicking Edit > Capture Screenshot or pressing F10 on your keyboard.

This will capture a clean image of the viewport, without any user interface, gizmos, or other editor-specific content.

3You can use the console to find the location of your screen captures. By default, this is in the users documents folder under /Kit/shared/screenshots/.

4You can capture higher resolutions by configuring your viewport to render at a specific resolution, by clicking on the Viewport menu button and choosing Viewport > Render Resolution. From there you can choose a predefined resolution or enter a custom one.

2Adding camera animations

In this part of the tutorial, you will reference a USD that contains some camera animation paths used to create shots for Cesium for Omniverse’s launch video. You will be working with a camera shot that starts with the whole globe in view and zooms down to fly above San Francisco.

1Add the Zoom to San Francisco camera animation to the Stage by clicking File > Add Reference and selecting /tutorials/03_capturing_image_and_video/camera_anims/zoom_to_sf.usda from the Cesium for Omniverse samples.

2Enter the new camera by clicking Perspective > Cameras and choosing ZoomToSanFranCamera.

3You’ll probably see a blank screen; this is because the referenced camera’s clipping plane is too small. Click the Settings button next to ZoomToSanFramCamera to open its properties.

4Find the Clipping Range property and change the Y value to be 10000000000.0. The globe should now appear, but it will be gray.

5The Simple Fog we configured in the previous tutorial is causing the globe to render gray. Go to Render Settings > Common and disable Simple Fog.

6The globe will now render as black. Go to Render Settings > Ray Tracing > NVIDIA DLSS and turn on the Ray Reconstruction.

The globe should now appear in the viewport.

7Lastly, let’s turn off the background sky. Omniverse automatically renders the HDR image from your Dome Light as your background, but this can be disabled. Select the Dome Light in the Stage to view its properties. Find the Visible In Primary Ray property and disable it. 

The sky should disappear and the globe should be surrounded by the darkness of space. Your stage will still be lit by the Dome Light and its HDR image.

8You’re almost ready to play back the camera animation—but first we need to increase the length of the default Omniverse playback timeline. Open the Sequencer by clicking Window > Animation > Sequencer.

9The Sequencer should appear at the bottom of the screen. Change the Scene End time at the bottom right of the screen to 340 frames. This is the length of our animation.

10Finally, click the Play button to the left of the viewport. The camera should begin flying toward the globe and zoom down to fly above San Francisco. Don’t be alarmed if the streaming of the Cesium World Terrain or San Francisco Photogrammetry datasets does not keep up with the camera animation; we’ll go over methods of managing this in the next part of the tutorial.

3Capturing video

Now that we have loaded a camera animation, we’ll use the Movie Capture tool to produce a high-resolution video.

1Click Window > Rendering > Movie Capture to open the Movie Capture tool.

2You should be able to capture a video using the default settings, however double check the settings align with the image below. Note two settings that have been changed specifically for this tutorial:

• Settle latency: At this time, the Movie Capture tool does not know how to “wait” until Cesium for Omniverse has finished streaming data to the appropriate detail level. This can cause videos to be captured that have data insufficiently loaded, resulting in popping or even missing data entirely. 
  
  Settle latency tells the Movie Capture tool to render a set number of idle frames before capturing the next frame, giving Cesium for Omniverse time to stream in data for the next frame. You may need to experiment with finding a suitable setting, given computer power, internet connection, detail levels, and other factors that may affect load time.
  
• Format: Capturing to an MP4 makes it easy to quickly view an output, but it is recommended to capture individual frames into lossless formats such as PNG, TGA, or EXR if a professional video editing package is being used to assemble the video.

3Click Capture Sequence to begin capturing. You can watch the progress of the capture in your viewport. Ensure settle latency frames are being rendered.

4Once the capture is complete, you can open your capture path by clicking the folder icon in the Movie Capture tool. 

Next steps