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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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    ghostlyfuAuthor
    Up and Coming
    March 7, 2014
    Yes, 0-360 then actually render 1-360, besides that - just as you describe.
    I'm doing some tests at the moment with the camera pair at different distances (backward/forward) from the null object. Fingers crossed.
    ghostlyfuAuthor
    Up and Coming
    March 7, 2014
    Success!
    For anyone suffering the same way, Maya's default is to 'smooth out' animation (change Tangents from Spline to Linear in Graph Editor to stop this). The elongation of the start/finish of the render was due to this slowing down effect on the camera animation. Like many problems, the solution should have been obvious but was actually really tricky (for me anyway) to see.
    cheerioboy
    Up and Coming
    March 7, 2014
    oh! haha, that didn't even occur to me. 3dsmax has the same thing where it will automatically ramp the animation from two points. You have to force a linear movement in the curve editor.

    glad you solved it! :)
    jonfaiella
    New Participant
    March 31, 2014
    I'm sorry if my question reveals my ignorance on the topic, but stereoscopic 3D is a new subject for me.

    I was wondering if it was possible to use photographs or video of a location as the level for a game, instead of modeling the landscape/building/assets in say Unity or UE4, could I use the digital video as the level which my character navigates through?
    cheerioboy
    Up and Coming
    April 1, 2014
    @ jonfaiella

    depends on what type of game you want I suppose. You could use stills/video if the game was of a Myst type style, click your way through, adventure type thing. Using a sequence of panoramic stills...

    Maybe someone else could chime in?
    mStuff
    New Participant
    April 1, 2014
    I know it's not 360x180 renders, but I am playing around with 180° fisheye lens video and stills of the Blender Gooseberry project, you can find it here:
    http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?332189-Rendering-head-tracking-ready-stereoscopic-video-for-the-Rift&p=2614187#post2614187

    Playing it in VR Player, I have some problems with perspective skewing, any insight would be appreciated!
    mediavr
    Up and Coming
    April 1, 2014
    "mStuff" wrote:
    I know it's not 360x180 renders, but I am playing around with 180° fisheye lens video and stills of the Blender Gooseberry project, you can find it here:
    http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?332189-Rendering-head-tracking-ready-stereoscopic-video-for-the-Rift&p=2614187#post2614187

    Playing it in VR Player, I have some problems with perspective skewing, any insight would be appreciated!


    Yes I have problems using fisheye perspective 3d pairs in VR Player too. The only solution I can find is to convert each fisheye into equirectangular 180/180. You can use PTGui (or the free Hugin) to do this. Then you assemble them side by side and set Projection in VR Player to Dome (I wish Stephane would have that format renamed to "Equirectangular180" as "Dome" is not a standard name for a projection). The alternative in Blender is to use Cycles renderer and render out 360/180 equis and crop them in half. (It would be really cool if you could specify HFOV for equis in Cycles).
    mStuff
    New Participant
    April 1, 2014
    "mediavr" wrote:
    equirectangular 180/180


    It works perfectly! I did the conversion in Hugin (very awesome piece of software :O) and VR Player shows the render with no perspective skewing at all (with a little fiddling with the barrel distortion factor value)

    Thanks! Sure saved me a lot of testing

    Image: http://www.pasteall.org/pic/show.php?id=69197
    ghostlyfuAuthor
    Up and Coming
    April 9, 2014
    I've just posted in Showcase https://developer.oculusvr.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=28&t=7745 on my 3D/360 music video project which was the reason I kicked off this thread (big thanks to all who advised me along the way!).



    Here's a quote from Philippa Boyens, Screenwriter of The Hobbit which I found really inspiring:

    "... who knows what the future of film is going to be like. It sounds weird, and we probably think we don’t want it to happen, but it could be a completely immersive experience, holographic… it’s not going to stay static, that’s for certain, and I think that’s a good thing."
    bcoyle
    Up and Coming
    April 9, 2014
    looks awesome :)

    look forward to watching it!
    http://www.quitenice.co
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