Hi all and happy new year 2019 :),
does anyone know if the 4 Panorama types (Equirectangular etc…) for Panoramic Camera would be added to EEVEE ?
That type of camera is generally easier to implement natively in a path tracer like cycles.
There are hacky ways of getting an approximation out of more game engine-like renderers, but it generally involves scripting a process of rendering small slices of the panorama and stitching them together.
Also screen space effects like glows tend not to work very well.
I did a project at work where we used ue4 to render out a 30 minute vr project to equirectangular video. It takes a while and involves a lot of hand holding!
If you’re simply looking to get faster panoramas out of eevee vs cycles, I’d caution against that assumption. The live panoramic viewport in cycles alone is super beneficial. In my opinion the ideal solution for speed would be to bake whatever lighting you can to speed up renders. Best of both worlds if eevee gets baking support!
Hi,
you nailed exactly what I aimed for : speed up renders for equirectangular videos to make virtual tours. Last image I rendered in Cycles for just a 360° tour took 7h in UHD on a GTX 1080 Ti. Perhaps, it’s time for me to look at renderfarms and/or take your advises about baking but I have a lot of transparency and reflections and I’m not sure I can bake a lot.
Thanks.
I am hoping that it’s matter of time before they implement it. I would be quite happy once this feature lands in Eevee for the same speed-related reasons.
I think I read somewhere that @dfelinto will try to implement panoramic cameras for eevee, but as @shteeve pointed out probably not all screenspace-effects will work as expected.
If you want to use cycles, I would recommend to bake the diffuse part of the lighting and path-trace reflections, refractions and transparencies. If you only do some single panos for a tour do not even think about baking, but in a scenario like half an hour archviz-interior UHD+ 60fps panoramic video, baking and longer preparation-time would make more sense. We have had a case like this in the office last year, and I can report rendertimes for quite noise-free UHD+ frames in 90-120 seconds on gtx 1080.
Baking workflow requires some knowledge about a little of everything, but there are good tools for batch-baking, uv-packing etc. and a helpful community, so you can set up a pipeline quite quickly.
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Look at eeVR addon to Blender 2.8
this is not my project by the way
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There is some movement on this, it was just recently moved from Backlog to Eevee features: https://developer.blender.org/project/board/96/
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Every projection can be transformed into any other (with some losses)
You can:
- make a 6-sided cube camera in eevee (6 cameras, 90 deg each)
- render out 6 animations in eevee
- build the box and map the 6 sides with emission shaders
- render equirectangular with 4 samples or whatever in cycles (only the box, static camera in the middle)
didn’t try it myself, but math-wise it should work out
edit: of course it will have some artifacts in screen space effects, but maybe this can be fixed with 90+ deg cameras and fading the emission box mappings?
To do that is easier to use the eeVR add-on! Works more or less like you mention, but uses a code to map the 6 sides to equirectangular panorama.
But yes, I’ve tested it like you mention and it does work just fine as long you don’t use the post effects.
The thing is that if you want to render a 20000 frames animation in Stereo 
…it just wont work… I would be tired by frame 2 hehe.
Edit: I’ve noted that this add-on has already been mentioned, just a few posts before, sorry!
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Hey! Thanks for recommending the EEVR Add-on such a great tool! You mentioned in your comment that Stereoscopic Animation. Is there a setting for that somewhere in the add-on? Thanks in advance for any help.
Hey @collasoul
You just need to enable the normal Blender “Stereoscopy” with these specific settings:
Everything else is set up like if you would render normal Stereo
Keep the resolution as 3840-2160 to get a full frame of 3840-3840 (the minimum for today VR equipment).
Best regards
-Rogério-
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