Lightfield rendering: when to expect? Tweet

[SamuelAB]

So I've tried the 'Welcome to Light Fields' from Google and it was great!

I am wondering when we will be able to render and view something similar with an ORBX file? Is this many years ahead, have there been any announcements yet that I missed?

I believe lightfields are the future of rendering, so i cannot wait to start doing architectural lightfields from Revit models for work. If I have a rough timeframe, we can start investing in rendering hardware or whatever necessary hardware to support and pioneer it properly as an artform.

[noisyboyuk]

I expect a lot of this is under an NDA as thick as my head as I've been asking this question a lot over the past year with little to no response.

Just speculating here of course but I expect that is because there is the Facebook partnership (that also has RED involved making a cinema quality 6dof camera) and Adobe taking care of the editing side, they probably have to keep a lot of what they have planned under wraps with there being such a big race going on behind the curtain to turn 6dof into marketable products (plus patents and stuff).

My guess is that on the purely CG side of things we'll have lightfield rendering done within Octane as ORBx scene files from whatever your 3D app of choice is, and we'll be able to then explore those scenes via game engines (being as Octane now comes with Unity).

So piecing together from stuff I've read and videos I've seen, I'd say you'll be capturing with Facebook's 6dof cameras as a pro or from your phone as a consumer, rendering CG with Octane, editing 6dof video with Premiere (and perhaps compositing with After Effects but I hope Nuke will do their own thing with it being not being a 2.5D compositor) and you'll be making things interactive with game engines such as Unity and Unreal.

Whether or not there will be some other content creation tools or delivery platforms being made though I have no idea. Like yourself, I'm dying to know more - just want to get ahead of the curve

Got my Octane, got my Vive - now I just want to play

[SamuelAB]

I cannot wait until I can push lightfields of architectural designs using VR headsets. It's too bad the reality capture aspect of it is delaying the purely digital lightfield as a medium.

Thanks for your informed response!

[Reality4]

PresenZ VR & Chaos/VRay have finally released the public version of their 6DOF volumetric system:

https://support.presenzvr.com/Download

It looks aweomse! The sea animation is impressive. I haven't checked how much a credit would cost to get rid of the watermark. I understand this company needs to make money, but I think it's a very bad idea to put a hurdle on creating content.

Seeing all this I don't understand why a whole game engine is needed, I guess all the interactive tech needed is far more compact when you strip UE4 or Unity3D from all unnecessary parts. Which is what PresenZ did.

Would be great to have just a standalone Otoy viewer to explore my scenes, or is Otoy mostly focusing on interactive volumetric content right now? Or the live action as stated above...

One frame in the PresenZ sea animation is about 11MB. So a whole (blockbuster) movie would be 2 hours = 2 * 60 * 60 * 30 = 216000 frames ~ 2.4TB for 360-degree movie or about 1.2TB for a 180-degree movie. Both quite large. And compression also depends on occlusion, so complex scenes can be much bigger I guess.

That is a lot of data to push towards a client player. Also, creator Nozon stated that a GTX700 or 900 plus Intel i7 is a minimum to play everything smoothly. Both high(er) end specs, but currently not a problem in a movie theatre setting. Is that the first real target?

I'm now dusting off my VRay skills and some old scenes, until I can do the same with Octane

(*ADDENDUM: Nozon said their tech is different from light fields and more optimized and smaller. But that was a 2016 statement.)

[Reality4]

I've extensively tested PresenzVR and I have to unfortunately conclude that it's no more than a glorified exporter of an optimized scene (mesh + materials) to a game engine (their own viewer).

As they state themselves, it has nothing to do with light fields, which becomes very clear when you see that reflections and refractions don't move correctly at all. Somewhere on their website 'deep reflections' are presented as a new feature: before they just baked reflections into the mesh.

I'm guessing this is their global workflow:

1) Create a universal mesh based on all the models in the scene. Imagine a sphere that is projected onto everything visible starting at the camera location outwards. All model areas that are outside the parallax view of the 6dof-box you move your in, will be cut out. if you look closer at the demos you'll see gaps and holes behind furniture. I guess then next that universal mesh is optimized as much as possible to display fewer polys.

2) Unwrap the universal mesh and bake the albedo colors into one map

3) The 'deep reflections', refraction and specular get a separate treatment. But all reflections look very strange when you walk around, I've seen much better reflections in UE4.

Overall the quality of the PresenzVR output is not as close to V-Ray as they want you to believe. Also on edges and in creases and corners you can spot misplaced triangles from the universal mesh.

But I have to say they did a great job on compressing and running the ocean animation (that you can download), that can't be easy to achieve.

This is a far cry from the light field render promise of OctaneVR. I bought the Oculus Go mostly because I wanted to finally view the ORBX media player. And although those demos are only stereo cube maps, it already looks much better. Which says a lot since it's only stereoscopic. Especially the Keloid animations are stunningly beautiful. I know this is mostly the artists at work, but still...

Oh by the way, removing a watermark for your PresenzVR costs 100 euros! For one frame, no animation. If you're not into that kind of pricing you might want to look into Google Seurat which has similar functions, except that it lacks special treatment for reflection/refraction which you could add on your own inside Unity or Unreal.

[DarkMoon]

So, how does one create a "Lightfield cube?

From what I see on the demo images, it should be a problem to create those, all in all they just flat images.


I really would love to see some sort of Whitepaper on this and how this works in the Otoy viewer...

Any help would be apreciated