Godot Engine for Virtual Production

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:bust_in_silhouette: Asked By Gall_oro

Hi there,

I am really new to Godot (and game engines in general).
I am working in digital arts and interactive / generative contents and large scale projections.

For my day to day job i am using tools like Media Servers, Blender, Touchdesigner etc…

I am in need to learn tools like game engines, i.e. Unity or UE4 as those are becoming really good for realtime graphics in the art industry (out of Game Dev)

Is there any plan for Godot to develop tools for that industry : Realtime Graphics / Filmmaking / Interactive installations and as such all the goodness needed like Spout / Syphon texture sharing, NDI protocol, OSC Etc…

Thanks a lot

:bust_in_silhouette: Reply From: Calinou

Reading your question again, it seems you’re talking about real-time rendering here. I still think the features you need are better implemented as third-party modules, as most people will never need them.

The old answer follows for posterity.


Godot is a game engine, and making prerendered scenes is considered a byproduct rather than a primary focus of development. I wouldn’t expect any of these features to become first-class unless a contributor is really interested in adding them and is OK with keeping their changes in a third-party module.

Still, it’s possible to use Godot to prerender scenes: GitHub - Calinou/godot-video-rendering-demo: Demo project for high-quality offline video rendering with Godot

The Vulkan renderer will expose many high-end options, making its output more suitable for prerendering as well.

Edit: In Godot 4.0.beta, there is a Movie Maker mode to achieve non-realtime video recording without third-party scripts.

Hi,

Thanks a lot for your answer.
I am talking real-time rendering, not pre-rendered. But for purpose other than a game.
I am talking about realtime graphics for live productions and interactive/generative installations.

As such, the realtime graphic engine of a game engine fits perfectly as well as all the interactivity features, but in this particular field, we miss a way to display the realtime rendered scene outside of the game engine. Though this is not a purpose of a game engine hence the need of Syphon / Spout / NDI protocols and MIDI / OSC for data exchange and support for video capture cards for instance as gateways to bring video and controls from the game engine to other specialized software.

I know those feature are more of plugins as they don’t concern game dev as such. Also i know this is not the direct purpose of a game engine, but demand is increasing really fast in this industry.

Was just asking as i don’t develop games but interactive installations.

thanks a lot

Gall_oro | 2020-02-25 09:55

Having an add-on that’d provide NDI input and output from Godot would open it up to use in live (realtime) video productions like UE4 is.

I guess it should be totally possible - OBS has an NDI implementation (add-on?).

NDI is a low latency high-quality video (and audio) transfer protocol developed by NewTek.
It allows much lower latencies than something like RTMP or SRT, and is excellent for use over local network to patch video signals together without using expansive video hardware and SDI connections.

unfa | 2021-06-05 21:10