[Nova66]

The Spherical panorama lens has been a great addition to Maxwell Render. Now that VR head sets are becoming main stream, it would be so cool if Maxwell had a STEREO Spherical panorama lens.

Octane Render do a Stereo Panorama lens as you can see here:
http://render.otoy.com/forum/viewtopic. ... 6&start=20

You can see John Carmack talking about it here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FaRHbmX ... age#t=2096

And you can see Solid Angle's implementation of their Stereoscopic Panoramic Camera here:
https://support.solidangle.com/display/ ... mic+Camera

I hope this is something that's doable with Maxwell's camera model.


Andrew.

[reaver]

I'd love to see this too. Been messing around with my Oculus DK2 and the difference between normal and stereoscopic still panoramas is pretty noticeable. A lot more immersion. Hopefully NL will come up with something, I'd hate to have to buy yet another render engine just for this feature.

[reaver]

I entered the render the metaverse competition hosted by a competitor render engine and the Stereoscopic cubemap camera in they have is INCREDIBLE. If you have a gear VR you will know what I am talking about. VR is definitely the future and I really do think Next Limit need to add a similar feature to Maxwell. I'm on the verge of buying this other render engine just for this feature as I am pitching VR to my clients as a future service. I'd love to be able to do it in Maxwell as I love the render quality but may have to switch if NL drag their heels.

Come Next Limit get with the 21st century 2d is dead VR is here to stay:)

[Nova66]

VR is definitely the future and I really do think Next Limit need to add a similar feature to Maxwell.

The Beta isn't out yet but it looks like Maxwell 3.2 will have support for a stereo panorama lens
Scroll down to the bottom of this page to see the details:
http://support.nextlimit.com/display/mx ... era+Lenses

The image format is Lat-Long rather than Cubemap but I'm sure the various stereo viewers will be able to handle that. On my Nexus 6 I use "PSViewer 2" and it does a great job with the stereo Lat-Long format.


Andrew.

[reaver]

Thanks for the info Nova.

That's definitely a step in the right direction. Although it looks like its still a spherical camera which I presume will have pinching at the poles. I was playing around with VR panos in Maxwell a few months ago and found the pinching to be a real problem.

The cubemap has no pinching and no seams if you haven't seen one yet google render the metaverse and check out the winners. I have a gear VR but apparently you can use this app to view them on a cardboard or similar https://play.google.com/store/apps/deta ... odeck.free Here are my entries if you're interested https://render.otoy.com/forum/viewtopic ... 97&t=49319 and https://render.otoy.com/forum/viewtopic ... 97&t=48313 I could not have produced these in Maxwell as the pinching would have ruined them. There is an in browser viewer on the site (the "interactive preview" button). It won't give you the full stereo VR experience but you will see what I mean about the lack of pinching.

I'd love to be able to create even better images in Maxwell. I hope NL have a comparable or better solution some time soon.

[Nova66]

Although it looks like its still a spherical camera which I presume will have pinching at the poles. I was playing around with VR panos in Maxwell a few months ago and found the pinching to be a real problem.

Hmm, I've never had a problem with pinching at the poles. Are you sure that you were rendering the panoramas with a 2:1 aspect ratio? I can't think what else could be causing the problem for you.

I know that theoretically Cubemaps have less distortion than the Lat-Long format but I did wonder how Octane render was processing the panoramas internally. I could imagine that they were doing a spherical projection internally and then simply converting that to a cubemap at the end. In that case the minor benefit of a purely cubemap workflow would be lost but as I say, I have no idea what Octane render is doing internally.

The render the metaverse competition is very cool and ironically I downloaded some of the Cubemap stereo panoramas and converted them to the Lat-Long format so that I could view them with the PSViewer app. It was tedious doing the conversion and if I'd known about the Holodeck app I wouldn't have bothered. Never the less the PSViewer app displayed the stereo panoramas flawlessly with no pinching at the poles.

I liked your "130 Arrrgh" submission, the debris in the air definitely helps with the feel of being in a 3D space


Andrew.

[reaver]

Hey Andrew,

That's really interesting. I must be doing something wrong with my sphericals. I'll have a play later. I hope you're right it would be fantastic if I could render VR pano's in Maxwell. Thanks for the comments re my VR image, glad you liked it. I'll post some more once I've had a play around in Maxwell.

Cheers for the info.

[reaver]

I've been doing some testing with spherical cameras in the S6 Gear VR and the pinching is definitely there. It's horrible at low res (under 4k) but over 4K (4096x2048) it reduces significantly, although it is still visible.

If you convert the Spherical images to cubemaps the pinching is completely removed.

I looked at the 4k spherical in the Oculus rift DK2 and it look fine but the screen is so good on the S6 that it is noticeable. Is it a deal breaker? Not sure yet. So far I have just rendered out a UV checker inside a box room so I have to see it in a real scene. But the Stereo cubemap seems to be the best solution for creating high quality VR images that I have found so far.

I'll upload the images and post them sometime tomorrow.

Edit: There may be an issue with the way oculus 360 stitches Sphericals, so I'll try a few other apps and a couple of other phones.

[Nova66]

If you convert the Spherical images to cubemaps the pinching is completely removed.

This suggests to me that the Spherical Lat-Long format is not the problem since any pinching at the poles would be baked into the Cubemap after the conversion.

Edit: There may be an issue with the way oculus 360 stitches Sphericals, so I'll try a few other apps and a couple of other phones.

I wonder if the problem is with the viewer software that you're using. I converted your "Creative Mind" cubemap panorama to a low resolution (2048 x 1024) Lat-Long stereo panorama and the 'PSViewer 2" app showed no pinching at the poles. I also tried the "Turn Me Panorama" app (which is not stereo) on your panorama and it too had no problem with pinching at the poles.

I didn't mention it last time but I like your "Creative Mind" submission too. The more you look at it the more surprises you find relating to your theme


Andrew.

[reaver]

Hi Andrew,

Tested a few devices and viewers today and as suspected its the viewer app that is the problem. Here's what I found:

Gear VR:
ORBX Viewer. Noticeable pinching. Noticeable seam line.
Oculus 360 Photos. Noticeable pinching

Galaxy S5 and S3:
PV Pano Viewer. Noticeable pinching
PS Viewer. No pinching
VR Gallery. Noticeable pinching
Holodeck. Did not seem to work with sphericals. Noticeable seams on cubic maps.

Oculus Rift DK2
Koloreyes 1.3. No Pinching
Virtual Desktop. No Pinching

So the only app that did not pinch on phones was PS Viewer. The software on the PC/Rift had no problems.

I'll have to test with a greater range of scenes but initial tests seem to suggest that the majority of viewers have a problem rendering spherical maps correctly. Not good. I haven't tried a fisheye yet. I might give that a go later.

Glad you liked "The creative mind" I had to knock that together in 10 days. I abandoned the idea I was working on as 130 Arrgh didn't score well with the judges. They were looking for more abstract/surreal scenes so that's what I gave them I could have spent another month on it, I had a ton of ideas I left out. It was the first time I used octane and it was a good experience overall but the poly limits and memory constraints really caused a lot of problems, especially with 130 Arggh.

I'm working on a couple more Vr scenes I'll try to render out in Maxwell. I'll post the results here when they're done.

[reaver]

I decided to get an Octane license as well so all bases are covered. Hopefully I'll have the best of both worlds. Looking forward to seeing what NL do with 3.2

[reaver]

BTW have you seen Chaos group have added a stereoscopic cubic camera to Vray 3.2 Sp2. Here is a scene rendered in it http://www.v-ray.com/downloads/blk_gear_vr.jpg It looks amazing in the gear VR. I think Maxwell will be way behind the curve with a spherical camera. Like it or not most applications render them with pinching. NL should really look into this if they are serious about VR.

[Mihai]

Is the crispness really a matter of whether you project a render on a cube, or a sphere? Or does it rather have to do with the resolution of the render?

6 x (1500x1500) = 13.5 megapixels.

So if you do a lat/long render it would need to be 5200x2600 = 13.5 megapixels.

That would be more of an apples to apples comparison.

[Nova66]

Tested a few devices and viewers today and as suspected its the viewer app that is the problem.

On the Android platform I've been using "TurnMe Panorama" for normal Monoscopic Panoramas and just recently the developer has added the ability to view Stereo Panoramas that are in the MPO file format. I use a program called "StereoPhoto Maker v5.10" to convert the Left/Right Lat-Long panoramas to the MPO file format and it works really well with TurnMe Panorama and Google Cardboard


Cheers,
Andrew.