2/24/2026 at 9:25:49 PM
Unreal supports Panini out of the box, but very few games seem to use it or any other alternative projection.https://dev.epicgames.com/documentation/en-us/unreal-engine/...
HYPER DEMON may be the best known and most extreme exception, it renders 180 degrees in front of you, then renders 180 degrees behind you as a red-tinted overlay, giving full 360 degree awareness if you can wrap your brain around it.
by jsheard
2/24/2026 at 9:33:35 PM
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 somethingby zokier
2/24/2026 at 9:46:55 PM
You can kinda do it in the vertex shader, but 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 instead, which makes it trivial to use any projection, but that's a non-trivial departure from how most engines work. Post-process is the least intrusive way to do it.I'm not sure what HYPER DEMON does, it's built on a custom engine so they could really specialize into the crazy FOV if they wanted to.
by jsheard
2/25/2026 at 5:14:51 PM
Can also be done in fragment shader with up to six 90 degree cameras. For a fast-paced game doing it in vertex shader is probably fine. I’m not sure what HyperDemon does.by projectionguy
2/25/2026 at 7:23:58 PM
I was also thinking that maybe you could render the center part of image in higher res than outside edges. So that when you apply the projection filter it's less of a problem.by zokier