Hi All,
I'm not sure if it is the right section of the forum to post this.
I've been experimenting with the new Terragen 3.2 features to create a 360 degrees-180 degrees stereo 3D panorama for Oculus Rift.
It's working well so far and I'm pleased with the result.
To produce a 360 degrees-180 degrees stereo 3D panorama I'm doing the following steps.
-create a scene
-setup a Spherical Off-axis Stereo camera with the right parameters (in my case the zero parallax distance is around 1000m to focus on the flying saucers and the inter-axial separation is 60m, the virtual camera rig is 300m above ground)
-setup the Render node to produce an image with an aspect ratio of 2 (to have equi-rectangular pixels)
-calculate GI for the full spherical image.
-rotate the stereo camera to produce 60 slices of 6 degrees each (I use the crop function to process only a 6 degrees slice in the center of the image) for the left and then right channel. I could make smaller slices to be more accurate my I've found the 6 degrees slices to be a good compromise.
-crop the images to remove the black area and mosaic the 60 slices to produce a Left eye. ditto for the right eye.
the result looks like that:
[attach=1]
I use LiveViewRift to see the 3D panoramic image.
I have a near obsessive interest in this topic. And I like your image here. I hope to buy a rift soon. And will like to view your image with it (there are also cheaper ways to view a still like this that anyone can afford now).
Please keep this thread up to date with your testing, good info is difficult to sort due to so many people saying so many things about various issues. The Oculus forum is saturated with *non-Developers* giving opinions on every part of any process. And that is on top of issues of using forums to collect real facts in the first place. So anything that you say based on experience will be good at least to me, and I am sure others too, I hope. (waiting for dandelO to show up with some 0f his 360s ready for oculus too).
Please think about animation! Nothing too crazy, perhaps just that ship flying in the scene, keep the camera where it is. I have heard a number of arguments about what frame rate to use. And there is a disconnect between info on games and video. In addition to what fps work best, what res, I am very curious about the notion of "presence" in a simple spherical animation like you could do now (if you have time for the rendering ;)) I wonder if animating the camera with a slight "floating movement", would be good or bad for adding to the sense of presence in your scenes? How much does sound add to the feeling of being there like the sound of the ship in the distance, wind/air, the city below?)
Cool! Keep it up man!
AYOu may like to try this too since you have the head set. : https://forums.oculus.com/viewforum.php?f=28&sid=983189c6878fc2cb2349c9dc75824e4f lots to download and see whats working or not.
I'm curious why you didn't just render out to a single spherical image for each eye and skip the stitching step.
- Oshyan
Hi Oshyan,
to generate a 360 degrees stereo pair the left and right cameras have to rotate at the center of the baseline. Stereo vision happens perpendicular to the baseline.
if I only generate a single spherical image for each eye, the stereovision will only happen at one specific spot. What I want is a full 360 degree stereo pair and for that I need to rotate the stereo rig to capture the full 0-360 degrees range.
Here is a paper explaining the concept: http://paulbourke.net/papers/vsmm2006/vsmm2006.pdf
Ohhh I see. Hmm, shame there's not an easier way to deal with that.
- Oshyan
Quote from: TheBadger on February 02, 2015, 07:10:39 PM
Please think about animation! Nothing too crazy, perhaps just that ship flying in the scene, keep the camera where it is. I have heard a number of arguments about what frame rate to use. And there is a disconnect between info on games and video. In addition to what fps work best, what res, I am very curious about the notion of "presence" in a simple spherical animation like you could do now (if you have time for the rendering ;)) I wonder if animating the camera with a slight "floating movement", would be good or bad for adding to the sense of presence in your scenes? How much does sound add to the feeling of being there like the sound of the ship in the distance, wind/air, the city below?)
Thanks for the feedback. Animation will be a challenge as at the moment there needs to be 60 frames with camera rotations to produce one panorama. at 60fps, it won't be easy until a good workflow is worked out.
Hi Man.
I have read in several places now, where people assert that 50fps is the sweet spot. In arguments where the other side insists that 70pfs is fundamental. Again, never with any distinction between video and interative games (if there is a distinction in fps), but still an argument that I keep running into when I search.
A few times now I have read people say that if a FR is below some number they have to take the set off. They say they get nauseous. I would be curious to know if that is going to be near universal or those people just have more sensitivities to it. But 70fps is really discouraging! Even 60.
How does it look to you as a still in the set? Does it look great to you, just ok? Too much work for too little reward? You are the first too post a render for oculus here! Nothing to get too exited about?.. Too late ;D
Quote from: TheBadger on February 02, 2015, 11:59:43 PM
How does it look to you as a still in the set? Does it look great to you, just ok? Too much work for too little reward? You are the first too post a render for oculus here! Nothing to get too exited about?.. Too late ;D
I find it impressive. The full immersion experience is just great. It is pretty easy to generate one set of stereo frames with the new spherical camera and the stereo option.
The cropping, mosaicing and generation of the Left-Right image can be fully automated in photoshop.
Here is a modified version of the first pic with multiple clouds layers.
[attach=1]
Oooh cool, wish I could afford to make the jump.....
Quote from: Aerometrex on February 02, 2015, 08:43:30 PM
Hi Oshyan,
to generate a 360 degrees stereo pair the left and right cameras have to rotate at the center of the baseline. Stereo vision happens perpendicular to the baseline.
if I only generate a single spherical image for each eye, the stereovision will only happen at one specific spot. What I want is a full 360 degree stereo pair and for that I need to rotate the stereo rig to capture the full 0-360 degrees range.
Here is a paper explaining the concept: http://paulbourke.net/papers/vsmm2006/vsmm2006.pdf
Terragen's spherical camera has this ability built in! :)
From the release docs:
"Stereo also works with spherical projection. This can render content for Virtual Reality and other panoramic stereoscopic 3D applications. Many popular renderers need special hacks or custom code to render panoramic stereocopic 3D because it is more complicated than simply rendering panoramas from two different camera positions, but Terragen now supports this natively."
Basically, to render the left eye you just click on the "LEFT" radio button and hit render. No stitching required.
Matt
Quote from: Aerometrex on February 02, 2015, 06:22:31 PM
-setup a Spherical Off-axis Stereo camera with the right parameters (in my case the zero parallax distance is around 1000m to focus on the flying saucers and the inter-axial separation is 60m, the virtual camera rig is 300m above ground)
I would think that for the Rift you should probably use Parallel mode, not Off-axis. Maybe it depends on the settings in your viewer, but I think generally the assumption is that zero-parallax is at infinity. Unlike with stereo TVs and such.
Matt
@Aerometrex
Hi man, did you see Matt's posts? Very interested in your guy's back and forth here. Were you able to confirm on your scene? Any issues? all is good?
I know you guys are all working. But please resolve the open questions in this thread if you have time. :) Can you confirm matts fix address the issue in the paper you mentioned?
I had seen this in the release notes as well and was very excited by this.... but I have sooo many projects going on at the moment. :) but they're all related. I'm working on ground-based photogrammetry workflows and setups to supplement UAV imagery for detailed scanning of buildings. https://sketchfab.com/uomdigitisation/models (https://sketchfab.com/uomdigitisation/models) and the guys at Learning Environments at the uni are now talking with me about generating content for their VR stuff (also RIFT) to demo to researchers. I'll send them a static panorama and see what they say.
Big thanks Ben!
Look forward to knowing for sure, since I want to render something in this way soon. And I would like to have some certainty about how to render, even if I don't fully understand all the theory... which I don't.
If anyone else has a RIFT and wants to test this for me, here's a download link for 2 images (expires 25/3/15) https://cloudstor.aarnet.edu.au/sender/download.php?vid=64551c13-4d6a-d308-639b-000000373519 (https://cloudstor.aarnet.edu.au/sender/download.php?vid=64551c13-4d6a-d308-639b-000000373519). 2D panorama is here: https://www.360cities.net/image/candor-chasma-peru (https://www.360cities.net/image/candor-chasma-peru) (yes the Peru thing is weird... it's a quirk of the system and the way I uploaded the image)
BEN!
Mars looks beautiful this time of year. To bad about it not having any air to breath.
2 things about it...
It is interesting that zooming in just a little bit removes the fish eye effect that you get from very wide angle shot. That bowing is something I have seen in just about every rift demo video that I have looked at.
My question is, could there be a way to render that we use a narrower FOV, but in the end put it together in a way that we can keep a more human wide view. IF that sounds strange, I guess just imagine shooting a pano with a 35mm lens, instead of a 55mm lens, for example. When stitching a pano still, its not a problem. So I am just curious if you or anyone can explain a way to render and get rid of the fisheye effect, if that word can really apply when there is no real lens.
I guess I am asking about some way to trick the system really, or rather the eye at least. I imagine that in the rift, narrowing the FOV would mess up the perception of distance and space if rendering that way would even be possible.
Also, I hope this is still on topic. But why does a pretend lens in 3D have real world problems? Maybe I should know this already, but I don't. So sorry if anyone thinks that is a silly question.
The other thing from the image I wanted to ask about is the really really unfortunate banding in the sky. Other than using an over cast sky, how can I make sure I don't have this in any of my renders?.. I believe there are threads on this, but I don't recall anyone ever giving the solution, if there is one.
I dont have my rift yet, but I can't wait to se what you made. I downloaded to make sure I have it when the rift gets here.
Hope someone else can take a look and tell us what they see now! But I am looking forward to seeing all of these images and then really being able to see the issues and the results of any fix. I think I really have to see it in context to really understand everything. But thank you for helping to make that possible for me and I hope others too.
And really, that is a great looking image of mars. You can even zoom in to the ground almost all the way, and still have nice crisp details 8)
I'm thinking something like this:
http://krpano.com/forum/wbb/index.php?page=Thread&postID=58228#post58228 (http://krpano.com/forum/wbb/index.php?page=Thread&postID=58228#post58228)
That gives you all the features/resolution of the panoviewers with stereo. I'll have a look at this over the weekend.
Quote from: Matt on February 12, 2015, 03:20:58 AM
Quote from: Aerometrex on February 02, 2015, 08:43:30 PM
Hi Oshyan,
to generate a 360 degrees stereo pair the left and right cameras have to rotate at the center of the baseline. Stereo vision happens perpendicular to the baseline.
if I only generate a single spherical image for each eye, the stereovision will only happen at one specific spot. What I want is a full 360 degree stereo pair and for that I need to rotate the stereo rig to capture the full 0-360 degrees range.
Here is a paper explaining the concept: http://paulbourke.net/papers/vsmm2006/vsmm2006.pdf
Terragen's spherical camera has this ability built in! :)
From the release docs:
"Stereo also works with spherical projection. This can render content for Virtual Reality and other panoramic stereoscopic 3D applications. Many popular renderers need special hacks or custom code to render panoramic stereocopic 3D because it is more complicated than simply rendering panoramas from two different camera positions, but Terragen now supports this natively."
Basically, to render the left eye you just click on the "LEFT" radio button and hit render. No stitching required.
How would that work for an entire animation? Do I always have to manually switch between LEFT and RIGHT?
You basically render left and right eyes separately. If you were rendering on multiple machines you could either render all left eye frames distributed across all machines, then all right eye frames, or distribute left and right eye frames among your machines.
- Oshyan