Final render 360

Here's just the image that I worked with:

Here's my 360 video uploaded to Youtube:

The quality lessened after it transformed into 360, I realise this is probably due to the image being more stretched once it has become a 360 format but overall it looks alright at 720 or 1080p - you can watch with google cardboard or by dragging the video around.

Here is the Metadata encoder used to make the video 360 on youtube: spatial media metadata injector

Points for the future:

• work from a higher resolution image
• make the sky more seamless

360 compilation after effects

I started compiling my image as a 30 second video with 360 view and a sky background with a overlay yellow hue. Just testing another way to compile the scene:

VR version 1

Here's some samples from my panorama test (please ignore the bent tree in the foreground). I had to input it through the IrisVR app which made the video work but would not let me download it, it was tied to my account and viewable through a VR headset. I might look at other ways to make the video so I can upload it more easily here:

Steps to make a panorama image

I looked into making a panorama for a video since my camera is sitting stationary I probably only need one frame that is 360 or panoramic to create the video. I followed these steps here to make the render:

Maya and V-Ray

1. Using a regular camera in Maya with “Treat as VRAY Physical camera” enabled or disabled
   1. Lens/FOV settings shouldn't matter because it is a "proper pano" in grabbing all 6 angles appropriately to later stitch together.
2. To enable the cube, open the Attribute Editor for the camera:
   1. In the attribute Editor for the camera, ensure the V-Ray Camera Settings are displayed by going to the “Attributes” menu, the “V-Ray” submenu, and make sure “Camera settings” is checked.
   2. Scroll down to “Camera settings” and check “Override Global Camera Settings”.
   3. For type, select Cube 6x1.
3. To set the resolution, open the Render Settings dialogue:
   1. Open the VRay Common tab.
   2. Expand the Resolution rollout.
   3. Resolution must be a square, where x is the same as y. For this example, we are using 1536x1536. Since the image is essentially an unwrapped cube, with 6 images in a row horizontally, we need to set the resolution to be 6 times wider than it is tall. For our example we will enter 9216 for the height since it is 1536 x 6, and 1536 for the Height.
4. To enable Stereoscopic, open the Attribute Editor for the camera:
   1. In the attribute Editor for the camera, ensure the V-Ray stereoscopic camera settings are displayed by going to the “Attributes” menu, the “V-Ray” submenu, and make sure “Stereoscopic camera” is checked.
   2. Scroll down to “Stereoscopic camera” under “Extra VRay Attributes” and check “Treat as VRay Stereoscopic camera”.
   3. Eye Distance should be set to 6.5 cm (2.56 in.).
   4. Make sure “Adjust Resolution” is checked, otherwise the resolution from step 3.3 above would need to be modified to be 12 times wider rather than 6
   5. Other settings can be left to their defaults.
5. Once all is setup properly, you should have a render of 12 squares each at 1536 res, all side by side for a total of 18432x1536 with the left six belonging to the left eye and the right six belonging to the right eye.
6. Upload the image to app.irisvr.com/panos. Full tutorial here.

Camera and render

Its time to place the camera into the scene. I've put my camera in the centre with it rotating around the scene as a turnaround. However when scroll through the timeline or even create a playblast Maya crashes :( I'm not sure how to fix this at this stage so I've just moved onto rendering out my images:

Here's a clearish render of my scene - I removed the skybox for rendering because it was coming through all of my images and I wasn't sure how to turn it off. I will place the sky in the composite of the video so the trees and grass are being rendered out in their own layers at this stage.

Cleaned groups

In order to reference my scenes in without chances of errors popping up they needed to be grouped and have other items such as cameras and lights or unused planes cleared from the scene. The fine groups looked like this:

Referencing issues

At first I was saving my objects as FBX assets and creating references to those assets in a new scene with a background environment.
I found out though when saving out and reopening the scene the object would lose its textures and I would have to reset the reference link which was a real pain. It was suggested I needed to reference an entire scene rather than just referencing objects in asset format. This worked out as the file paths were remembered when I reopened the scene so I had little issue using it for rendering.

File > reference editor > create reference >>>choose the scene to reference in + ctrl+shift+d to create an inference of that item.

*example of problem

exploding tree problem

I had some problems with rendering the fern bases in Maya because they sometimes explode with the bump value on the displacement map and the normal map. It was suggested that I reduce this so I rendered it a few times until I got the value to about 0.025 and it looked fine:

Initial rendering of base scene

I created a base backdrop for my tree scene, however I ended culling the mountains because they looked to blurry and flat. I placed some trees in the scene to render but noticed it looked kind of washed out:

Here's a render after I fixed the colouring - adjusting gamma in render settings, should be around 1 or 2.2 + also turned off default lighting in settings:

Playing in Unity

Was having a play around with creating an Island in Unity so i could get used to the program a bit. Definitely a faster way to generate scenery, however I know little to nothing about script editing so I had to look up the problems when i started having issues (such as placing the moveable character, and the waves motion bugging out).