First of all, thanks a lot for developing this great Tool.
It is exactly what I was looking for for years to do Interactive Media Installations.
I’ve gone through all the new Tutorials and Example Files for UE4 and there is only one thing that I cannot seem to wrap my head around.
How can I simply send a Canvas from LA to UE and use it as a RenderTarget 2D?
I understand that this was done using Spout before, but I read multiple times now that with 3.7.0 LA moved away from Spout (also that it made things unstable for people here in the Answerhub).
And then there is all the Projection Mapping using nDisplay Config File explained.
But to be honest, this seems a bit of an overkill to me if I just want to export Media that I composited in Lightact and put it onto a flat Material Texture inside Unreal.
So should we still do this via Spout (like explained here and here)
Or is there another solution to this by now?
Thanks a lot in advance and keep up the great work please.
You are right, at the moment, they best way for you would be to use Spout plugin for UE of which there are a number of different versions on GitHub, and stream the texture from LightAct using Spout.
Just wanted to make sure I use an up to date workflow.
Do you think it would still work to wrap this up and make it into a 24/7/365 Installation using one of your servers + the manager? (With using Spout, as this would be the only external variable besides LA/UE). This would go out to a big real estate client, so things MUST be stable.
Yes, we used LightAct + Spout + Unreal in Tampa Water Street project using 2 Syncs 6000 with 12 HD Spout streams alltogether and it’s been running fine for more than a year now. So, once you get everything running, it should be stable.
As 99% of our users used Spout to get content from UE to LA and not the other way around, we decided we won’t be maintaining our fork of the plugin anymore once we started to use TextureShare. That being said, you should be able to use one of the forks that are still maintained, such as this one for example (please note, this is not an official endorsement in any way and that if the plugin isn’t working to your expectation we most likely won’t be able to support you - we will certainly try though ).
A side note, Spout plugin for UE has been very stable for quite some time. The only updates that were happening were to make it work with new versions of Unreal Engine. Epic tends to move things around a lot so with almost every new release of UE, this plugin needed to be updated in some minor way.
).