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Can anyone point me in the right direction in starting to understand how I would go about building a VR scene in Maya using OctaneVR?

I have all plugins already installed on my machine. Otoy's VR contest for example, how are people learning how to create these scenes for that contest?

I've looked through the documentation to no avail.

Before you get started on the VR renders (which are just 360 panoramas, you can turn that on in the camera projection settings), have you been able to get your scene rendering correctly for normal 2D renders?

If you're referring to "normal" 2d renders in Octane. Yes, I have a plethora of characters and scenes that I've been rendering in Octane no problem. How can I make those into "OctaneVR" 3d scenes?
Also I scoured my camera attributes in Maya and couldn't find a "Projections" attribute. I could only see there's a projection type, Spherical, Cylindrical and Cube.

g0ll4m wrote:If you're referring to "normal" 2d renders in Octane. Yes, I have a plethora of characters and scenes that I've been rendering in Octane no problem. How can I make those into "OctaneVR" 3d scenes?
Also I scoured my camera attributes in Maya and couldn't find a "Projections" attribute. I could only see there's a projection type, Spherical, Cylindrical and Cube.

Good - can you try Spherical, 360 x 180 degrees, 1024x512 and confirm you are able to correctly render a 360 pano image? If so, then the next step is to try turn on stereo. You can start with anaglyph (e.g. red/green filter per eye) just to get as a sense of depth in the 360 scene. Use this to make sure that objects are not too close to the camera (ideally about 10-20x IPD, so the nearest object should be no closer then 1-1.5 m to avoid any eye strain for stereo renders, assuming your scene is at real world scales)

When you are happy with how the above 360 render looks, make the following adjustments to create a final VR render in stereo cube map format:

- make sure to turn OFF post processing (if it is enabled)
- switch to side by side stereo
- switch to cube map camera projection
- set render size to 18432 x 1536 (this should give you 12 square tiles in a horizontal strip, each 1536x1536 - 6 per eye)
- save the render as a PNG 8-bit file
- drop the PNG file in ORBX media folder on the Gear VR - you can then view it in the ORBX media player app (be sure to download the apk from the Gear VR store if you haven't already)
- You can also view your VR render on a PC +DK2 with Virtual Desktop (which just added support for Octane VR cube map stereo renders): http://www.vrdesktop.net/

Let me know how that goes.

The step I feel like I'm missing, is where to plug the panoramic image in to? Is it the same as creating IBL? Do I do it the same way I plug an HDR image into the Octane Sun/Sky environment node?

Or do I have to create a projection node from the Projections Node list in hypershade? Or is it creating a sphere object in 3d space then mapping an image texture onto that?

The more I think about it, it seems it would be the sphere in 3d space, then this would be replaced by an existing maya scene geometry.

g0ll4m
All you need - just set the existing camera to "Panoramic" type, and then set the "Cube map" mode for it in "Panoramic camera" settings rollout.
After that, if you start the render from this camera - you will see the rendered image has 6 cube map images in it (or 12 if stereo is enabled).

Don't forget to download the latest version of the Maya plugin.

JimStar wrote:g0ll4m
All you need - just set the existing camera to "Panoramic" type, and then set the "Cube map" mode for it in "Panoramic camera" settings rollout.
After that, if you start the render from this camera - you will see the rendered image has 6 cube map images in it (or 12 if stereo is enabled).

Don't forget to download the latest version of the Maya plugin.

Hi Jimstar, thanks

is possible for you to provide a starting file, with the recommended lens type and placement inside say a box, so we can see the best way to use that feature?

Thanks for the info.

When you say no post processing, I take it this if for vignetting, glare, bloom etc.

How would glare be applied to a VR image, if you wanted this?

cheers.

Jimstar, I was unsuccessful with your instructions. I attached a screenshot of my camera setting. This is the latest engine version that is compatible with the latest standalone version.

prodviz wrote:Thanks for the info.

When you say no post processing, I take it this if for vignetting, glare, bloom etc.

How would glare be applied to a VR image, if you wanted this?

cheers.

it works more more or less in spherical projections, but not across cube map faces. The only way around this is to render each eye as sphere projection with post pro, then load into Octane as environment, then re-render as cube map (per eye) to get the stereo cube format. For post pro, the sphere pano can be much smaller.

One way the devs have made this slightly easier in the SE for animated VR, is by merging the batch and keyframe animation scripts. You can render a second, smaller spherical pano per frame with all the post pro in a render pass. The ORBX player can also load a spherical 360 pano over a cube map (this is what you see when you launch the app). We are adding add/modulate to this layer, so you can easily use it for shadow or post post pro compositing over the raw cube map. This should be in the next app update.

We support EXR FP16 loading in the ORBX player too, and the idea is we could do HDR+tone mapping+ post pro locally with a future build. Iceleglace is working on a mobile library to do this.