Recently I tweeted a test still I rendered of Beeple's awesome Zero-Day short film.
Here's the link to the cube map version (for OrbX):
http://bit.ly/1O37R9l
I just wanted to run through some experimentation I've been doing and see if anyone else has been exploring similar processes. One issue I was having, was since "post effects" don't render properly into panoramic scenes, I've been looking for a clean way to composite without causing seams to appear in the cubemap renders.
At first my approach was to create a complex comp structure in AE to restitch the proper sides of each face as I'm working with it, then reassemble back into the proper strip. This seamed overly complicated and would never allow you to see everything together at once.
My next thought was to figure out what the 18k resolution actually equates too. A rough estimation got me to about 5k per eye of 16x9 pixels. So I created this Beeple render by rendering each eye spherically mapped at 5k. I then did glows and custom color correction masked into the right areas. The final step was just to bring the comped frames back into Octane for a quick skydome render to convert them into the cubemaps.
Has anyone done similar experimentation along these lines? Is there a more straight forward way of doing this?
My next challenge is to apply this all to animation. Otoy seems open to helping out with the rendering process if we can use this as a sort of show piece for OrbXs new animation abilities. That would be so cool!