Forum Discussion
Using 360 images for previsual work in accurate real world scale
Hi I have some heavy 3D environments/scenes not originally optimised for VR and thus simply will not render at a performant level and FPS for obvious reasons. Ideally it would be great to take 360 ...
baroquedub many thanks for a concise bit of info!
The best (still not ideal and maybe not doable) I achieved so far with a pretty basic approach was to write a script that smoothly compensated the offset any head movement by bringing the Sphere position towards or away from the camera when the user moves their head position. It only works with low factor of movement of course.
All this being said, without a great deal of technical knowledge and skill I think the challenge versus reward might not be viable. I'm an old Indie dev and an older coal miner from my early years and some of the scenes I develop tend to be heavy all around but that's never been a massive issue with Desktop and GPU. It was my hoping to capitalise on my existing work (a lot of scenes and assets over 10 years) to generate stereo 360's and use them as environments for VR story telling. But overall it's like old school VR with a static sphere inviting nausea when the user moves around and the world moves with you.
On that note, optimisation it is! - Good thing is the tech and techniques are improving rapidly so maybe near future I can re-address this.
Many thanks
Alan
I'm very much an old school dev too and tbh I see that as an advantage over the generation of younger devs who can rely on everyone having RTX 4000 series GPUs or XR2 Gen 2 chipsets on standalone. They have it easy compared to those of us who learned our trade optimising for GearVR and other antiquated platforms 😄
If you do opt with pure 360, perhaps a simple SBS (side-by-side) stereoscopic cubemap might do the trick ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yDpOOOF0Xlk / https://github.com/Unity-Technologies/SkyboxPanoramicShader/blob/master/Skybox-PanoramicBeta.shader ) but of course you'll never get the parallax right and properly mitigate against that head on a stick view inside the skydome.
Some advice I came across years ago re. optimisation that really stuck with me was the concept of treating your scenes in terms of near-field, mid-range and distance. Optimising is not about decimating every elements in your environment in the same way, it's more about treating each asset depending on how far it lies from the player (which of course requires you to know where your player might be able to move). The Home environments are a good masterclass on this design aproach. So, just to prove there's no sell by date on quality, this video might be old but it's still pure gold in terms of explaining this concept of 'the range of perception': https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KYYdvtf2DhQ&list=PL4p5NRamFPnitdsEKV8GpY3DllccH-mzl&index=40&t=909s
Having been in IT the longest part of my career I agree I've seen everything since my 1st, the ZX spectrum, till now on my trusty 1080 LOL and that's showing my age. I'm not from the gaming/dev sector by any stretch but the skills are all transferable.
The big challenge is always resource. Time and energy of 1 man doing everything from 3D builds to dev code and all in between. The learning curves of new approaches eat a great deal of time and often that time gets wasted in trying and testing concepts which you have to do.
If anyone has interest my youtube channel and facebook have a lot of content related to my mining projects. Some are game like some represent the seriousness of mine disasters. I have a new VR project that is on app lab in testing right now as an ongoing project. - https://youtu.be/vRTBULMMvsE?feature=shared
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCS4xEu-iSdR_pPPkfBp20AA
Thanks again for the great advice !!
A