Using External 360 VR Cameras

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Using External 360 VR Cameras

You can use a simpler object insertion strategy if your 3D app contains a 360 VR (equirectangular, spherical, panoramic, ...) camera.

In this case, you can export the scene without running the Follow Mesh script: export the globally-stabilized scene. Some exporters may directly create a 360VR camera in the downstream application. If not, carefully change the imported camera from a perspective camera to the 360VR camera. Be sure to not to affect the position or orientation of the camera on any frame. If you can't change the camera's type, consider creating an additional camera and parenting it exactly to the existing one.

You can then render the scene through the 360VR camera, and the results can be composited directly with the stabilized footage. Note that you can do this once for all inserted meshes; you don't have to repeat it for each.

Tip : In applications that use multiple renders and a cube-map to equi- rectangular conversion (such as After Effects), be sure to create explicit lights

in your 3D scene. If each face render (top, bottom, left, ...) uses its own camera-dependent default light, there will be shading discontinuities in the final result.

If you want to verify that images rendered this way are correct, do a Shot/Change Shot Images with the Other---Don't do anything special option. Then, on the image preprocessor's Adjust tab, go to frame zero, then control-right-click the Delta U and Delta Rotation spinners to remove the stabilization. The rendered footage will then match the meshes in the camera viewport.

The SynthEyes to Blender exporter has some limited support for using Blender's Cycles panorama camera when exporting shots as above (ie with no Follow Mesh). It will configure for Cycles and the proper camera. You will have to set up any mesh texturing and other materials within the Cycles environment yourself.

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