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ghostlyfu
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

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    DaveBerg
    Participant
    February 10, 2014
    Thank you..

    Yes, the images are re-cropped and re-scaled bit badly 'cos I used them to make some prints and had added black bars up and down and now posting here I did a little hasty job cropping and scaling them back closer to original render.

    Hope this clears a bit.. I'm not 100% sure what you're asking.
    With 3dHippie In 3ds max viewport you can see the whole stereo Window, the Screen Plane etc. As you know having those messed up makes Oculus very unpleasant experience. 3dHippie has button to convert it's cameras to vray cameras so you don't need to use the constraints as i do with octane.
    so..

    1.After installing 3dhippie it is in 3ds max tab create->cameras->3dhippie->stereocam
    2.Put it in the scene as any other camera
    3.Choose from the object list the Stereocam001 and in it's modify tab just push the button "convert cameras to vray" and there's Stereocam001left and Stereocam001right vray cameras in you scene. Unhide all if they're not visible in object list or scene.
    4.In Stereocam001 properties you'll have controls over parallax and convergence and so on. All these can be keyframed. Making any changes to Stereocam001 or it's position moves your vray cameras (Stereocamleft001 and stereocamright001) and rotates them as you set the parallax or anything.
    5.Render the vray cameras as you want and compile somewhere else. Or in stereocam001 modify tab you can render left or right or anaglyph 3D --this however doesn't seem to work right with 360x180 cameras so i use it only to preview one direction at a time with standard camera.

    db
    cheerioboy
    Up and Coming
    February 11, 2014
    Hmm, I feel like I was expecting another step within 3dhippie to make spherical panos render correctly. Vray already has a stereo rig & stereoscopic helper, but neither gives you proper stereo panoramas. Well as long as you don't notice anything weird in your animation I suppose it doesn't matter :)

    But my quest for proper stereo panos continues...
    Pyry
    Up and Coming
    February 11, 2014
    Cheerioboy was asking me about this in a message, so I thought I might as well post it here. I have an html5/webgl/vr.js panorama viewer that will do mostly proper stereo panoramas.

    Here is the camera arrangement (for twelve cameras; you can extend this to however many you want):
    twelvecam.png

    The cameras in each pair are normal perspective cameras (i.e., not fisheyes), have parallel views (i.e., no 'toe-in'), and have 120 FOV both horizontally and vertically (they are square aspect ratio). You can do larger or smaller FOV, but 120 gives nice vertical coverage. The cameras are rendered to 1024x1024 images. You can do other (power of two) resolutions (e.g., 512z512, 2048x2048). The images are not pre-stitched together-- the stitching happens dynamically depending on the HMD viewpoint.

    Here are two examples (the same scene, but with 12/24 cameras); you will need vr.js:
    http://www.mtknn.com/vr/webgl_synth12.html
    http://www.mtknn.com/vr/webgl_synth24.html
    Note: Make sure to hit 'F' to go into fullscreen! It works best if you have the rift set to extend you desktop, move the browser window over to the rift, and then hit F.

    Here is one of the twelve images loaded by the viewer (for the twelve-cam panorama):
    http://www.mtknn.com/vr/synthpano_12/left0.png

    Feel free to copy the html/scripts and host on your own server if you want to try it out. I'll eventually put the code up on github under some permissive license. Alternatively, if you want to render out 12/24 views as described by the camera arrangement above, you can send me the images and I'll host it.
    DaveBerg
    Participant
    February 11, 2014
    Hello..

    Here's two links to left and right. These look fine to me with oculus and I've used
    the procedure described earlier but with octane cameras.

    If you compile these do you find some error or problem
    that would describe your problem? I'd compile them myself but I'm not at my
    workdesk for another two weeks.

    https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B7KbFl8hFiEHSk9kdmhPOURJQUU/edit?usp=sharing
    https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B7KbFl8hFiEHZms3V1VqUVZra1k/edit?usp=sharing

    db
    cheerioboy
    Up and Coming
    February 11, 2014
    "DaveBerg" wrote:
    Hello..

    Here's two links to left and right. These look fine to me with oculus and I've used
    the procedure described earlier but with octane cameras.

    If you compile these do you find some error or problem
    that would describe your problem? I'd compile them myself but I'm not at my
    workdesk for another two weeks.

    https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B7KbFl8hFiEHSk9kdmhPOURJQUU/edit?usp=sharing
    https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B7KbFl8hFiEHZms3V1VqUVZra1k/edit?usp=sharing

    db


    Hey Dave,

    Yeah this example is quite tough to gauge the stereoscopic effect since it's all water. You see that the whale up front, and at least one of the waves looking forward as well. Things get harder to read looking to the sides and even behind. But it looks like you're already framing the most important visuals in front so they wont be affected.

    I wont upload the combined left/right because I brutalized the image with gamma and curve adjustments to see the scene better and try to gauge the depth. Thanks for sharing your images, it's fantastic work :)

    ps: 3dhippie is now free (http://davidshelton.de/blog/), I just emailed the creator and he wasn't sure if his plugin supported stereo panoramas, but he asked to let him know if it did
    thrillhouse900
    Participant
    February 14, 2014
    Hey Everyone! I've been working on a render script for 3dsmax for the last little while. At the moment the script renders the frame out in a predermined number of strips. I found if you render the scene in too many strips, (like 1px strips) you start to see some aliasing issues. I want to work on blending the strips, but I haven't gotten around to that yet.

    http://rennervfx.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/still.jpg

    This is the script:
    http://rennervfx.com/share/StereoPanoRender.ms

    This is a little animation I did with it:
    https://mega.co.nz/#!pBZGxSZZ!tN8SRtrMBJK8KA2jkBy9YMwm6FUlLSknsZQ5f3Zh9xY
    DK2: Processing. 9:51AM
    cheerioboy
    Up and Coming
    February 18, 2014
    "thrillhouse900" wrote:
    Hey Everyone! I've been working on a render script for 3dsmax for the last little while. At the moment the script renders the frame out in a predermined number of strips. I found if you render the scene in too many strips, (like 1px strips) you start to see some aliasing issues. I want to work on blending the strips, but I haven't gotten around to that yet.

    http://rennervfx.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/still.jpg

    This is the script:
    http://rennervfx.com/share/StereoPanoRender.ms

    This is a little animation I did with it:
    https://mega.co.nz/#!pBZGxSZZ!tN8SRtrMBJK8KA2jkBy9YMwm6FUlLSknsZQ5f3Zh9xY


    You're in trouble now :)

    I'm going to be bothering you so much! I'm actually finishing an animation that used a maxscript my friend put together for me - I'll be looking at yours and contacting you shortly :) - and also posting my animation!

    update: do you have a chunk recommendation? at 360 chunks, I was getting black seams between my strips. Previously I was doing 2 chunks by accident :P and the strips weren't lining up properly. Any tips on a chunk size that worked for you? my favorite part about your script is that it does both left/right for each frame, instead of all the left, before doing all the right.

    update2: adding compressed test animation from an experiment with a different script - https://www.dropbox.com/s/k9h50qrhr1713ej/oculusVR_animated_3d_v2_sm.mov

    update3: links to uncompressed animation
    https://www.dropbox.com/s/6pcmokajxhfpuci/test_animation_001.rar, very first 4-10 frame animation
    https://www.dropbox.com/s/brwwnh4j5pswjoi/oculusVR_animated_3d_v2.rar, hi res of animation above
    Dreymo
    Up and Coming
    February 18, 2014
    Hey guys,

    which codec / settings are you using for your 360 stereo rendered videos, I can't play 4000x4000 H.264 MP4s smoothly in VR player and I have a pretty fast PC (4930K OCed to 4.3GHz and a GTX770) ?

    Here is a little Intro I have rendered some time ago:
    https://mega.co.nz/#!RRsSmR7b!eIfBHA1a6kda59vfq_KMfTkJCtsd5BdWG4Vcz-Kp29U

    -Dreymo
    http://www.riftaway.com | http://www.chillyvisions.com
    cheerioboy
    Up and Coming
    February 18, 2014
    "Dreymo" wrote:
    Hey guys,

    which codec / settings are you using for your 360 stereo rendered videos, I can't play 4000x4000 H.264 MP4s smoothly in VR player and I have a pretty fast PC (4930K OCed to 4.3GHz and a GTX770) ?

    Here is a little Intro I have rendered some time ago:
    https://mega.co.nz/#!RRsSmR7b!eIfBHA1a6kda59vfq_KMfTkJCtsd5BdWG4Vcz-Kp29U

    -Dreymo


    I've had issues with images & video past the 3k mark with VR Player... I'm not sure if it's a software issue or hardware. But both my work machine and laptop at home cap out past the resolution. So I've kept things around 2.5k or under.
    willy121
    Participant
    February 25, 2014
    I'm pretty new to 360 degree renders so please bear with me.

    I am able to render a 360 degree image for one eye but I cannot quite get your script for the 2 camera setup to work.

    I get the error "unknown property "rotation" in undefined".

    Any help would be awesome. I will post what I render.

    Thanks,

    Will
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