OTOY Forums

Is there any way to shoot panoramic images from octane without taking lots and lots of renders in octane to create a equirentangular image?

Something like panoramic Lens Shader in Softimage...

Anyway, It would be great have an automatic way to shoot equiretangular image directly from Octane.

I don't think there is at this current moment. It's still fairly easy to set up the camera in your software and use an exporter to get the angles you need.

Yes you can.
Back in the days when no spheron cameras was around or super wide angle lenses we used chrome steel or glass balls to reord 360 spherical hdr images on site when comping the cg with plate work.
I still have my very first steelball and it worked very well.
We took 10 different exposure shots of the chrome ball which covers something like 320 degrees of a spheres reflection.
We then moved 90 deg to either side and did 10 more exposure shots of the ball and comped the 20 images together in hdrstudio to get hdr images we could wrap in the environment slot on each seperate material, the global environment or on a physical sphere with the normals fliped insize the cg set.

However, you wont face all those low practical issues as you just need to do 2 images from same distance eg 3 meters 90 degrees around to cover all 360 degrees, then comp the 2 bitmaps together and do either a spherical or lat/long image.

And there you go

You need to use a very long lens, the longer the better. The distance between your camera and the 2 locations has to match up exactly, if they dont thwn you have to align them up in photoshop so they do

Feel free to ask if in doubt

I thought his question was asking for a single-render solution that automatically renders out 360x180 degrees (or however many he wants).