Once OctaneRender® is up and running, you can start viewing the provided samples. For a more immersive experience, use the Samsung Gear VRImmersively engaging and experiencing depth perception in a three dimensional scene through stereo vision goggles and head-mounted displays. Innovator Edition head-mounted display (HMD) with the Oculus 360 Photos and Oculus 360 Videos apps, which you can download through the Oculus Store on the Samsung GALAXY Note 4.
Besides the sample images, you can create your own. It is just like rendering a 2D image in OctaneRender as a 360x180 panorama. When you are happy with how your panorama looks, turn on stereo cube map rendering in the Camera node and make sure post processing is off. Finally, select the Gear VR stereo cube map resolution and start rendering.
Here are 10 useful guidelines for rendering scenes for VR headsets:
Turn off post-processing - the glare and bloom cross over the cube map edges. It is less necessary than you think, as VR renders are very different than images on a plane. For example, there is no DOFThe distance between the nearest and farthest objects in a scene that appear acceptably sharp in an image. Although a lens can precisely focus at only one distance at a time, the decrease in sharpness is gradual on each side of the focused distance, so that within the DOF, the unsharpness is imperceptible under normal viewing conditions. source: wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depth_of_field) or vignetting in VR renders. 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.
Figure 1: Turning off post-processing
Make sure the scene units are in meters. Inter-Pupillary Distance (IPD) is set in real-world metric units, and scale matters a lot. This is also going to be critical for light-field VR renders in the future.
Figure 2: Setting Length Unit to Meters
Set up your scene using a preview render target, with a normal spherical pano (Setting Up Scenes For Virtual Reality Headsets) camera at low resolution (Setting Up Scenes For Virtual Reality Headsets). Preview your scene with a cube map projection (Setting Up Scenes For Virtual Reality Headsets) with anaglyph stereo rendering or side-by-side stereo rendering (Setting Up Scenes For Virtual Reality Headsets) to test stereo offset easily (we may support 3D displays if enough users have this). When you are satisfied, you can then create a final quality Render Target for the 18K cube map render (Setting Up Scenes For Virtual Reality Headsets) that shares the camera position and orientation of the preview one. Make sure that your scene covers all directions. The VR feeling is more realistic if you have something underneath or behind you and you’re not just floating in space. If your scene is supposed to be viewed from a regular viewpoint, we recommend placing the camera somewhere between 1.4 - 1.7meters above the ground.
Figure 3: Normal Panoramic Camera
Figure 4: Image resolution
Figure 5: Cube map projection
Figure 6: Side-by-side stereo test
Figure 7: Gear VR stereo cube map resolution
For more information about OctaneVR, see the dedicated discussion forum at:
http://render.otoy.com/forum/viewforum.php?f=98