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Up and Coming
October 9, 2013

360x180 CG Renders

I'm facing a problem when rendering any pair of equirectangular images from inside a 3D modelling package (Maya in my case, but no doubt the same issues apply to many different packages). The attached (side-by-side format) image is an example. I'm hoping the good folk on this forum can help.

I render out my panorama (I use the Lat-Lon Mental Ray lens plug-in) and it looks as you'd expect. Looking at it through the excellent VRPlayer, it works well. I then shift my camera to another position approx 6.5 'virtual' cm to the side of the first position and re-render. Again this panorama works fine on its own.

I was hoping that I could just place these x2 renders side-by-side (as they are in the attached example) to make a 3D version of the scene. Not so. What's happening is that the 'forward' view works fine but the depth gets reversed towards the peripheries of the image (which just looks bad) until the 'back' view is completely inverse (and so look pretty much OK again).

Logically I can see that the reason is that the 'Right camera' becomes the 'Left camera' as it renders the part of the view directly behind itself. However, I haven't got a clue how to fix it and output an equirectangular panorama that works in 3D. Help!

    165 replies

    Inspiring
    March 18, 2015
    Very interesting technique.
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    Up and Coming
    March 18, 2015
    Maybe I am missing the point, but I can't figure out... why do we need to render 360 images with 1 FOV and merge them, to get panorama effect? What is the difference with... if I say, render sphere-map in 3Ds Max, put this texture on sphere, position oculus camera in Unity inside center of this sphere, and just view around?
    Up and Coming
    March 18, 2015
    A sphere map would work for mono but not stereo. For stereo the camera need to rotate around the edge of the circle instead of from the center. See: http://paulbourke.net/stereographics/stereopanoramic/
    Up and Coming
    March 18, 2015
    Ah, I see now, thank you. And that explains why simple 2 renderers from different position are not sufficient.

    From all the threads I gathered, I guess there is no yet perfect solution? I.e., this 360/1 technique still produced artifacts?
    Up and Coming
    March 18, 2015
    There are some renders that have internal cameras that do it right to create stereo spherical images.
    http://www.andrewhazelden.com/blog/2012 ... desk-maya/
    Up and Coming
    March 18, 2015
    Thank you, I see it has almost all the solutions. Unfortunately vray for 3ds Max is not finished yet, but as I can see from source code, its almost there.
    Up and Coming
    March 20, 2015
    After reading through this thread I made 2 tests of my own which I wanted to share - best viewed with LiveViewRift.
    They are rendered using 0.5 degree strips 7200pix wide panorama with Vray.

    I also wanted to thank everyone here for the info on such an amazing format :-)




    "Behind every successful man is a woman rolling her eyes" -Jim Carrey
    March 21, 2015
    Thanks dfelinto there's already some experimental Builds to render Stereo Panoramic images directly in Blender!
    No Strips, not hackish, just see in the viewport, render and see in Oculus! \o/

    www.youtube.com/watch?v=MVZJyosdw1o

    Check it on his blog post:
    http://www.dalaifelinto.com/?p=1009

    Cheers :D
    New Participant
    March 21, 2015
    have you guys seem this:

    http://pedrofe.com/rendering-for-oculus ... th-arnold/

    I have compiled the plugin example and it works fine
    Up and Coming
    March 21, 2015
    "vbalbio" wrote:
    Thanks dfelinto there's already some experimental Builds to render Stereo Panoramic images directly in Blender!

    I expect stereo lens shaders being made available for most renderers before long. good times :)
    "Behind every successful man is a woman rolling her eyes" -Jim Carrey