OTOY Forums

I use the Octane Panoramic Lens quite often and have noticed that more and more octane advances leave out the Panoramic Lens.

Instead of always asking (plugin, lua script, alembic export..) to support the Panoramic Lens, I was thinking if there was a way to combine the FOV (horz and vert) setting into the ThinLens camera that would solve the issue and devs would only have to support the thinlens cam.

The distortion in the thinlens camera sometimes works but is not really a match for the FOV setting.

Hi there,

Not sure what you mean by "leaving out" the panoramic camera. Could you give some examples?

It was a conscious decision to split the panoramic camera from the thinlens camera. They are 2 very different beasts and merging them in a single node is hard. Some settings are mutually exclusive.

The distortion in the thinlens camera is a barrel distortion. In some cases it kinda looks like a spherical camera but they aren't the same.

cheers,
Thomas

stratified wrote:Could you give some examples?

I get that everything is in some stage of beta release and very glad that the tech is released rather than waiting for everything to be perfect but it seems that the panolens is an afterthought.

Not sure about all the Octane plugins but the products that I have access to:

Octane Standalone
.lua script, turntable animation - "Error: no thinlens camera connected to the render target"

Plugin Blender
Limited support for the PanoLens camera, but not useful for production projects
http://render.otoy.com/forum/viewtopic. ... 85#p170834

Blender Alemblic Export, Can export alembic cameras for ThinLens, Orthographic but not PanoLens

Plugin OcDS (daz studio)
Does not support the PanoLens camera

hi there,

We don't consider the panoramic camera an afterthought.

You can perfectly script the panoramic camera in lua (node type octane.NT_CAM_PANORAMIC).

I don't know if it really makes sense to have a turntable animation based on the panoramic camera. Maybe it does in the daylight animation. You can modify these scripts, the code is available. The only reason we provided these scripts is because we chucked out the old camera animations from the standalone (which didn't support the panoramic camera either).

I can't speak for the plugins, you have to ask Jim and t_3.

cheers,
Thomas

r-username wrote:Plugin Blender
Limited support for the PanoLens camera, but not useful for production projects
http://render.otoy.com/forum/viewtopic. ... 85#p170834

It is just not Octane problem. It's some Blender's lack of features.
As you can see - Blender does not have a special viewport look for panoramic camera - only for perspective and orthographic. So, Octane plugin's code can't "match to nothing", if there is nothing to match to in the viewport. As in Octane's panoramic camera mode (the same as in any panoramic camera mode) - Blender's viewport shows the perspective camera view. But panoramic camera node is very different from perspective one, it has absolutely different settings, and it can't match to this perspective camera view and to its clipping box in this view. Moreover, Blender knows nothing about some of Octane pano-camera settings, so even if it will learn in feature how to show pano-camera inside viewport - it anyway will be not able to match Octane's camera without massive Blender's core code changes... So, in this case, all the plugin can do - just fit the full image into viewport or into render-result...
But anyway, your report is not forgotten, I opened the ticket right after you've posted it, and will try to make some improvements in this regard. Just some later, after more important things will be finished.

r-username wrote:Blender Alemblic Export, Can export alembic cameras for ThinLens, Orthographic but not PanoLens

Here are some troubles with alembic standard itself... So, so far it is impossible to export pano-camera...

JimStar wrote:So, in this case, all the plugin can do - just fit the full image into viewport or into render-result...

Thanks or taking the time to explain the behind-the-scenes tech. It must be hard having to respond to the tidal wave of requests and I feel a bit guilty taking your time away from working on the next release.

I have found that setting a image resolution/aspect ratio in blender that is similar to the entire viewport I get a png render that I can batch crop to 16:9. Now I'm looking for an easy way to define the width to 1920 and have the height 100% vs eyeballing the height number, but that is not really an issue.

JimStar wrote:Here are some troubles with alembic standard itself... So, so far it is impossible to export pano-camera...

Not surprised with this and I think the solution lies in octane standalone. After an alembic export from blender I often use the geometry transform node (in standalone) to fine tune the scene.

If there was a similar transform node for the alembic camera pin that let me change to the PanoLens camera (from the blender exported thinLens camera) and had FOV settings this would be the best solution. Even better this would work on the alembic camera pin from any source.

Cheers,
S