glimpse wrote:Looking forward to try this out! =) ..a good excuse to experiment with some
sculptural forms!
as far as I understand, we don't need a WIP thread for that, just need to upload entry we are happy with =)
are there any guidlenes, things to know/avoid with this VR experiece, delivering in format for Oculus/GearVR?
Here are 10 useful guidelines for rendering in VR using Octane:
1) turn off post processing. The glare and bloom will cross over the cube map edges. It also may be less necessary than you think, as VR renders are experienced very differently than images on a plane. For example, there is no DOF in VR renders, nor vignetting. You are not experiencing this render through a camera lens, but through something much more like the human eye (we may have post processing tools that mimic the eye on the client to do this right).
2) Make sure the scene units are in meters! Remember, ipd is set in real world mm units, and scale matters. This is also going to be critical for light field VR renders in the future.
3) Make sure that objects in the view are at least 10x the stereo offset distance. If your default IPD is 65-125 mm (e.g. 125 mm if you want to double the stereo strength). then the nearest object should be 70 cm -1.5 meters from the camera.
4) Unless it is very subtle, keep the camera upright and the horizon as a straight line in front of the viewer, especially for environment renders (interiors or exteriors). That is why we added the 'keep upright' option in the camera node editor.
5) Workflow suggestions: Set up your scene using a preview render target, with a normal spherical pano camera at low res (e.g. 1024x512) with anaglyph stereo rendering to test stereo offset easily (we may support 3D displays if enough users have this). Then create a final quality rendertarget for the 18K cube map render, that shares the camera position and orientation of the preview one.
6) Because these renders are so large, it really helps to use region rendering on noisy areas that show up early in the render. We will probably add a stereo region render tool to make sure that we apply the region render to each eye identically. Right now, this is a manual process, and it is very important not to have one eye have more noise than the other (or else you get bad stereo speckle)
7) Use hotpixel removal to get rid of the very bright fireflies, as fireflies in stereo look really bad, as they typically only show up in one eye and not the other. We used .75 on the Keloid example to remove all fireflies with a 1000 spp render.
8) Play with IPD scale if you have a marco object that you want to give a bird's eye view of. The space station sample has an IPD of 4 meters to give the effect that you are looking at a miniature. But it also pops out all the contours vividly and is a worthwhile way to show off details of a free floating model suspended in a space or air.
9) Experiment often with subtle tone mapping, lower contrast imager settings, and test multiple tone mapping exports in the VR viewer app as you make WIP tests. You may find harsh tone mapping and contrast that make a 2D image look great, don't work at all with VR. In VR you have bright high contrast OLED pixels right in front of your eyes and no ambient light that frames the render as you do with an image or video.
10) Octane's Specular and glossy surfaces can look stunning in VR, especially when you find the sweet spot which gives this awesome sense of 3D realism. Check out Enrico's kitchen scene, it shows this off perfectly. Making your VR render take advantage of this is an important tool that sets Octane rendered VR content apart from rasterized VR or VR photos/videos, which have trouble matching this level of fidelity (especially on mobile).