PhotoModeFX for Unreal Engine 4

Description :

PhotoModeFX for Unreal Engine 4.
A complete, generic, unobtrusive, easy-to-use in game photographic system (PhotoMode) for Unreal Engine 4.23.1 (and newer). Featuring HighResolution, Panoramic 360, Stereoscopic VR, Cubemap, 3DPhoto captures.

Features :

Moveable camera while game is paused.
Easy to use, add BP_PhotoModeFX to your level and is ready to use.
Pre and Post events to notify the game when PhotoModeFX is starting/exiting.
HighResolution with Buffer Visualization screenshots (via ScreenshotTools plugin).
Panoramic (360) and Stereoscopic (VR) with Buffer Visualization screenshots (via PanoramicCapture plugin).
Capture and export Cubemaps.
Generate 3DPhotos (for Facebook).
Blueprint only, to easily package your project to any supported platform.
No tick events.
Following current UE4 Best Practices.

Open Source Project and download :

https://github.com/DarknessFX/PhotoModeFX

Video :

UE4 PhotoModeFX

Watch this video on YouTube.

Blog :

I love PhotoMode in games, it’s my favorite new game feature in the last decade, because I love photography and I love games, you mix both together and is the recipe for perfection.

At first games I had lots of fun with PhotoModes, even with games that wasn’t that good I had a blast taking photos, but I think it was PS4 Shadow Of Colossus Remake and PS4 Marvel’s Spider-Man that made me realize the full potential of PhotoMode for GameDev study, I start to inspect every material, texture, normal map, meshes, learning some tricks and gathering new ideas. I found a villain wearing better leather shoes than I ever had, Wilson Fisk subsurface details where you can see the difference between his bald head and the line where his beard starts, the Colossus’s fur and skin.

Soon after I learned the value of PhotoMode for marketing, the way social media photo shares helped to give huge boosts in trends and popularity for games with PhotoMode and how it is a powerful feature that lots of programmers didn’t yet realize. You don’t have to trust me on this one, here is Insomniac Games’s Elan Ruskin – Marvel’s Spider-Man: A Technical Postmortem talking about the game PhotoMode (skip video to 45:34).

Marvel's Spider-Man: A Technical Postmortem

Watch this video on YouTube.

Last year I played Cyberpunk 2077 and again flooded my twitter feed with photos from the game, again it was pure love and joy.

I started to get an itch about make my own PhotoMode, about how awesome it could be launching a game that have PhotoMode and started to imagine/project how it could be done, if I have the skills to build something useful, more importantly to build a PhotoMode for what? I’m not working on a game, I don’t know what kind of game I will try to develop next, I didn’t want to create something that got me locked in a specific camera, specific type of game, specific angles, etc… If I wanted to create something useful I would need to create something generic, something that automatically set itself up and working, pause the game, add whatever it needed, take control, works its magic, then return to game mode like nothing happened.

I play around on UE4 and 4 days later I launched PhotoModeFX, looks like all this time and effort studying UE4 are starting to get me some results.

It wasn’t so hard as I expected to be, UE4 is amazing and all needed tools already exists on the engine, sometimes without user interface (just a bunch of console commands), sometimes exists as plugins, but I found that it was possible, it supports the idea of been generic, the system can create a new cinematic camera and let change settings in real time while paused, everything works surprisingly easy.

Normally I would research the topic before starting doing something, but this time I was so focused that when I noticied I already had the project ready in shape for alpha launch then I paused for a minute and went to see what other PhotoMode solutions already exists for Unreal Engine 4, you know, maybe I had to rename the project to YAPM (note: “YA = Yet Another” is a joke name/title when devs launch something that already exists). And yes, there are some good ones on UE Marketplace (for a price), a couple of good ones from UE4 Youtubers (free), but wasn’t that many options available, none actually open source and free on GitHub, so here is my entry: PhotoModeFX for Unreal Engine 4.

I hope you enjoy PhotoModeFX as much as I enjoy, I hope to see PhtoMode feature more commonly, in every and all games. I cannot help with other engines (for now) but at least I can help to push it forward for every Unreal Engine game/project.

If you have a complain, critic, problem, suggestion, feel free to comment and I will do my best to improve PhotoModeFX. It was easy to plug-and-play the system and watch it working with UE4 templates but real games and projects can be a wholesome different beast, it is not a gerenic system if it can’t fit for every beast around so lets improve it and make it great.