360x180 CG Renders

@ j1vvy

the alt+tab idea was a no go with VR Player. Maybe it works without an Oculus but with an Oculus only one window is controlled by the Oculus, leaving it difficult to compare. What might work is just leaving both windows in mouse mode from the get go and then toggling between them, hoping that the initial placement of the image on screen is suitable for comparing.

Stéphane had mentioned before a janky way to create a playlist. It seemed to be an accident, but you can load an .m3u playlist and it will sort of let you cycle through the list of images. I have tried it and it doesn't work very well, but it might get the job done for someone.

It should look like this:

- place images in folder
- open notepad:
put full file path in there, and save the file in folder with images as a .m3u

C:\Users\[user]\Desktop\VR Player\image_01.jpg
C:\Users\[user]\Desktop\VR Player\image_02.jpg
C:\Users\[user]\Desktop\VR Player\image_03.jpg

- open in VR Player and use A and D to go through images. (tip: it'll get stuck when you try and go further then the images you have in the list (although it might unstick if you press and hold one of the forward/back buttons..))

I've also been playing around with the eye distance in 3d space. I started with 3.5" and then moved to 6.5" - although the depth does become more prominent, it starts to become harder to compensate for the distortion in vertical lines. I might try 2.5" although I've been getting decent results with 3.5" eye separation.

Hello..

Here's what I've used:

I've been using Octane render, which has 360x180 camera, in 3ds MAX with 3D Hippie's stareocam plugin to achieve 3D 360x180 renders. 3D hippie produces a camera rig which with you can easily adjust parallax and convergence. I link my Octane cameras to Stereocam's physical left and right cameras. I render the images as 4000x2000 and I compile these in After effects in DNxHd codec with mov wrap (4000x4000 up and down) and play through VR player and VLC. If I'm mistaken Maya has a stereosupport (http://www.perspectx.com/blog/?p=896) that could be used with any panoramic camera.

Drifting from the original post:
Time consumption seems to be my greatest problem. I tried Mental Ray and V-ray but they're too slow not to mention Vue. Scanline rendering in max would be the best but I haven't found any solution to do the panorama camera with that. Panorama exporter on MAX can't do sequences.

Also tried with 12-16 cameras in After effects and element 3D and stitching with videostitcher. This was fast enough but videostitcher can't seem to produce 100% quality - there's always some little distortion.

Also tried the same thing in Cryengine 3 as in AE with the same problems. +Cryengine used to have panorama render option that would help videostitching but the feature is no longer supported. It would likely to be possible to use Oculus support by Blue in a game and with cut scene but making video with just one map is not very tempting. I also tried baking environment texture map (cubemap in CE) but no go. Produced image wasn't replica of surrounding environment. I planned to turn the cubemap to equirectangular with pano2VR.

Unigine and Unigine SIM seem to have panoramic capabilities but getting license for those are out of reach.
Unreal's UDK doesn't seem to have any panoramic options.
Unity seems to have possibility to do the multiple render targets that maybe could produce cubemaps but as far as i understand it takes some bit of scripting knowledge and unity PRO.

So..
If somebody finds a way to do 3DS MAX scanline renderer 360x180 panoramas or panoramas in Cryengine3 or panoramas in any least near-respectable realtime 3D like Lumion3D (which would not have enough resolution), it would be highly appreciated.

daveb

Hey..

I've been aiming for 30s per frame per eye with 4000x2000 because i'm working on animations.
Surely all the rederers can achieve the time but when getting decent quality I'm at 90s-240s on good day depending on
the scene. I probably soon will be paying for render service.

Octane itself has only anaglyph stereo support but that's not what i'm using. I use 3Dhippie's rig script/plugin that creates physical cameras to the scene. Then i link the non-stereo Octane cameras on max standard cameras created by 3Dhippie camera rig. Octane's camera is capable producing perfect 360x180. I do all the animation by adjusting stereocamera rig and then i render out both octane cameras, left and right. Looks good to me with Oculus.

...I did a scanline batch rendering with a 6 cameras (fov90, 19mm) today and compiled results as cross-shaped cubemap sequence in Ae. Then i batch-transformed in pano2vr to equirectangular. Seems to work, I got down to about 60 seconds per frame per eye . I'm still hoping to work in CE but it seems distant since for example CE seems to start it's animations like waves at different point on every render and also CE only has FOV control.. no mm setup.

Beautiful panorama, cheerioboy. Exciting stuff in this thread. :)

That room render was great. I couldn't even tell from the image itself I was supposed to be on the second floor overlooking a living room below. I'm looking forward to how far this can be taken and hope that game engines allow this option. Likely future engines will allow you to dictate an area of the sphere to be higher resolution than the rest of the scene. This'll sped up rendering times and would be useful in animated scenes where the main action (and likely where the most rendering time needs to be spent) will be in front of the viewer anyway.

By the way, for those that want to switch between S3D and 2D views to demonstrate the benefit to others do this in VR Player:

* Use Media - Effects - Depthmap where you use choose over/under or side by side depending on the image type.
* Use Tools - Settings - Effects and set the Max offset to "0", this means zero distortion of the displayed image.
* Switch effects between Depthmap (2D view) and None (returns to S3D view).

There's no way to hotkey this at the moment, but I like the ability of showing people the difference between 2D and 3D with movies and images. You really notice it in movies like Avatar that like to extend the scene far away from you.

Hello..

Here's two left and right pairs rendered with Octane (with whale about 50s per frame per eye and the other 130s per frame per eye ). Images are quite distorted due to freehand-scaling on my wix-site.
So, viewing with Oculus won't have very nice results.









Also there's few seconds compiled video in the end of this video:

http://bergdavi.wix.com/daveberg#!videos/ck0q

I was trying to combine your left/right images but I found that one was always a bit taller than the other? Same width but a few pixels taller than the other? I'm just trying to combine them for viewing in VR Player. I love the mood you've got going on in there.

Can you explain what you setup in 3dhippie, besides attaching octane cameras to the rig? I wanted to try and do the same in v-ray. Thanks!