Panoramic Lens and Post Effects Issue (repost) Tweet

[dotcommer]

:: Repost from C4D Forum Per Ahmet's Request ::

Hey Ahmet, I'm noticing an issue with the Panoramic Lens feature and bloom from Octane cameras. Where the edges of the image are, it seems the bloom is emanating from the edges of the image, not the content of the image. This causes visible seams in the panorama once stitched where a hard line forms because the bloom wasn't calculated during render time. I know this is a very low level issue, but I would love to see some kind of fix for this in the future! Here is an example of what I'm talking about. Its a render I did and uploaded to google photosphere. If you rotate 180˚, you can see the seam from the bloom not being calculated.

https://plus.google.com/photos/11641033 ... aqxv5HY8gE

side note: rendering with the panoramic lens and viewing the renders through the google cardboard headset is so much fun. You guys should try it if you can get your hands on a headset! The plans are online from Google, or you can buy a pre-cut/pre-made one online from places like amazon and dodocase.

[abstrax]

:: Repost from C4D Forum Per Ahmet's Request ::

Hey Ahmet, I'm noticing an issue with the Panoramic Lens feature and bloom from Octane cameras. Where the edges of the image are, it seems the bloom is emanating from the edges of the image, not the content of the image. This causes visible seams in the panorama once stitched where a hard line forms because the bloom wasn't calculated during render time. I know this is a very low level issue, but I would love to see some kind of fix for this in the future! Here is an example of what I'm talking about. Its a render I did and uploaded to google photosphere. If you rotate 180˚, you can see the seam from the bloom not being calculated.

https://plus.google.com/photos/11641033 ... aqxv5HY8gE

side note: rendering with the panoramic lens and viewing the renders through the google cardboard headset is so much fun. You guys should try it if you can get your hands on a headset! The plans are online from Google, or you can buy a pre-cut/pre-made one online from places like amazon and dodocase.

Currently, post-effects in panoramic renders don't work, because they don't use any information about the projection that has been used for rendering the image and doing a convolution on a sphere or cube is non-trivial.

-> Don't use post-effects with the panoramic camera.

[abstrax]

On second thought: We may be able to fix it for cube mapped panoramas, but for spherical or cylindrical projections I don't see a reasonable solution.

[dotcommer]

It would be awesome to have a cube-map "lens" in addition to the thin and panoramic lens options! Cube map is typically the better way to go for 360 content as the poles aren't crushed in the image. Not sure how this would be set up, but some way to orient the cube map "cross" either vertically or horizontally would be fantastic.

Sucks about the post effects issue with the rectilinear format, but I understand the issues with that.

[abstrax]

It would be awesome to have a cube-map "lens" in addition to the thin and panoramic lens options! Cube map is typically the better way to go for 360 content as the poles aren't crushed in the image. Not sure how this would be set up, but some way to orient the cube map "cross" either vertically or horizontally would be fantastic.

Cube maps are supported since version 2.21. We will potentially add more variations in the future. At the moment the cube map format we provide is made to make it work with the GearVR Oculus 360 Photos app.

[dotcommer]

Cube maps are supported since version 2.21.

Oh wow! Man, my version is way behind. Don't want to upgrade to Yosemite yet, so Ive been held back to 2.04 since the nvidia drivers require later OS versions.

[dotcommer]

I just wanted to follow up this post with a possible work-around.

Since the glow is a post-effect, we can recreate the same process by sending our render to AE or another vfx program.

Here's my workaround for After Effects:
• Import your panorama
• increase the width of the comp by around 500px
• apply a CC repetile effect to your pano, and extend the left and right sides until they fill up the frame
• apply an adjustment layer on top, and make sure its the size of the comp (not your original pano)
• add your glows and other effects to this adjustment layer
• When you're ready to render, set up your render settings to crop by 250px from the left and right side so the final output will be the original size of your pano
• Done!

The reason this works is because after effects is calculating the glow based on what is in frame, and it calculates this BEFORE sending to the render engine. So we get an image with the glow calculated on a 500px wider image than we need, and then as it's written to disk, crop it back to the original size. This will remove your seams caused by glow effects not being calculated at the edges properly!

Unfortunately, After Effects has a very basic glow function. And not all of us have more powerful software like Nuke to produce physically accurate glows. Just today though, someone released an inverse square fall-off glow effect for after effects! I bought it immediately, as this is probably very similar to how Octane calculates glow/bloom. You can find it here (and its 30% off for this month!): http://aescripts.com/real-glow/

I don't know how many people are going to find this useful as it doesn't seem like a lot of people are playing around with 360 content with Octane just yet, but hopefully in the future as the movement picks up steam, this will help more people! Ask me any questions that you may have about this. Hope it helps!