Fulldome camera lens (180° spherical fisheye cam)

[cmatias]

Hi.
I use to produce 3d scenes with max for planetarium screens use (hemispheric screen).
We call this Fulldome image rendering. (look for "fulldome" on the web)

This is easy to do with the VRayDomeCamera set at 180°FOV, or with the krakatoa camera modifier.

Is there any chance we'll have this feature in a future Octane Render release ?

Regards.
Carlos Matias

[Refracty]

This was requested many times.
I think they gonna implement it soon since VRay, Arion and soon Maxwell are offering this functionality.
As a workaround you can create a cubic render set and convert it to spherical later. But this can be tricky sometimes because of the sampling and different grain...

[Floating.Point]

It can be done without edge seams by rendering each side of the cube at 100 degrees FOV, thus providing an overlap to blend the seams away. Basically just do as you would with a cube map, but widen the lens a little bit. I used to do this all the time with Terragen 2, but it requires some kind of stitching software (I used PTGUI). Results were great!

[Refracty]

of course you can use a stitching application but this will extend the workaround a bit.
having it all with one mouse click would be a smart thing.
Now that the most basic features are there this is one of the goodies that could be in reach.

[clintond]

If you are feeling brave and a little experimental, you can roll your own fisheye lens too. The below image was made by doing just that

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[cmatias]

Thank you all for your contributions to this topic.

I now want to explain why calculating 5 images and stitching them is not as easy as it seems, but it is not the stitch process itself that is not an option...

Let say I want to render a 4096 x 4096 @30fps sequence.
If I go the stitching way I must render 5 parts for each final image (Front,Back,Left,Right,Top).
The circular border of the final image will be filled with the bottom of the front,left,right,back pictures:


From my final resolution (4096 x 4096 ) the circle border is 4096 x 3.1415 pixels long = 12868 pix
So I need each part image to be 3200 x 3200 to fill the circumference.

Have you any idea of the time needed to compute 5 images of 3200 x 3200 compared to one image of 4096x4096 ?

5 images 3200x3200 = 51.2 Mpx
1 image 4096x4096 = 16.7 Mpx

3 times more pixels to render and to handle along the stitching process ! It's too much !

[cmatias]

If you are feeling brave and a little experimental, you can roll your own fisheye lens too. The below image was made by doing just that
--

fisheye_03_cd.jpg

What do you mean by "roll your own fisheye lens" ?

Do you mean shooting the picture on a reflective sphere... or something like that ?

[Sheff]

I am also doing Fulldome and need 180° spherical fisheye cam ...
+1000

[clintond]

By 'roll your own' I mean make your own fisheye lens within Octane.

You could render a reflective sphere as you mentioned though, which can work really well too. Certainly the reflective sphere is fast compared to the refraction based lens which renders 3x slower than a 'non fisheye' render.

But if you wanted to play with the fisheye setup, I've attached a scene below. Thanks to the incredibly simple scene graph within Octane it is quite fiddly to move this setup around, but you should get the idea all the same.

Note: I attempted to upload the .ocs but the forum rejected it. I'm sure the approach is too experimental for you anyway. So go with the sphere approach as you only need to two renders 90 degrees apart to create a lightmap within something like HDRShop.

[Tugpsx]

You will have to rar or zip the ocs file. If attachment not possible can you post the graph node image instead. This will be enlightening to all who view.