Forum Discussion
Cube Vs Sphere for Pano projection
I have always used a sphere with inverted normals to project my equirectangular panos and show them in a VR scene with the camera in the center of the sphere.
Another option is to use a cube with a Skybox/cubemap material to project the same pano (converted from equirectangular to cube facing).
Visually I see the same quality, but in terms of performance, with the cube I only have 12 tris, instead of the large number of triangles that I get with a sphere.
My question is… ¿should I always use cubes and forget to use spheres to show panos?
Thanks for your comments
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should I always use cubes and forget to use spheres to show panos?
Not a bad idea. Equirect has some nice properties, such as the way it looks on a flat rectangle, but cubmaps are easier to render, they distribute the pixels better, and they have no singularities. EleVR has a nice post on the subject.- You are in a mathematical object, you can render a full screen quad or use compute shaders to raycast on it, no need for a real geometry in the first place. But if you are worried about the triangle count, be not, GPUs are made to hide latency in their pipeline, even with a few thousands triangles, the cost of filling the screen with a texture is quite enough to turn the vertex cost to absolutely nothing.
