Engine for research
What's up folks! I'm a PhD student researching human perception of light and colours (yes I'm aware of the research call :) ). I'm looking to investigate the perception of these aspects when viewed with an HMD (more specifically the Rift CV1). I have some experience with rendering, however I have no experience with game/VR engines. I'd like to use an engine that is capable of rendering as realistic as possible (HDR, PBR, spectral) but it seems to me this is simply too slow to use in VR. So my question is threefold: 1) Which engine yields the most realistic images? Hardware is not really an issue here (university fuuunds). 2) Most likely the results of the engine from Q1 won't cut it, so I'm thinking of rendering photorealistic spherical renders and viewing them with a Rift (no parallax I know). Ideally, I could walk around in a scene with the engine from Q1 and, with a press of a button, render such a sphere (with an external renderer such as Octane) and view it when ready (hopefully this is in the order of seconds). Is this AT ALL possible and if so, which engine would be best? 3) I'd also like to be able to let matlab change parameters in the engine while running (such as polygon count, tone mapping, maybe load another spherical render, ...). Again, is this at all possible and if so, which engine would you people suggest? Thanks for taking your time to read this and thanks in advance for the feedback/ideas! Michiel