Many of our rendering customers have asked us for a way of connecting various stereo panorama renderings, to get a connected, immersive VR experience. You can do this now using Autodesk Cloud Rendering and Autodesk Project Play.
See this example of connected stereo panoramas that we created - https://play.autodesk.com/pub/au2016pano View this on your mobile phone with VR glasses (like cardboard) for a complete VR experience.
Here are the steps for creating your own connected experience.
1. Render stereo panoramas - First, render stereo panorama renderings that you would like to connect with each other using Cloud rendering. It is a good idea to create preview renderings first and test your lighting, materials and cameras. Then render the views in final quality at 1536 px resolution. Do not render larger than that since most cell phones may not be able to handle large resolution files.
2. Download panorama - Once your panoramas are rendered, download panorama as a zip file.
3. Prepare images - The only file you need for Play is image.png. This is a high resolution image with two rows - one is the right eye image and the other is the left eye image. You have to slice this image into 12 individual JPG images and label them 0.jpg to 11.jpg. You can do this with any image editing software that you prefer, like Photoshop. You can also use ImageMagick to this in an automated way.
ImageMagick instructions.
- Download and install ImageMagick depending on your operating system.
- Open up your command-line console.
- Navigate to the folder where you put your image.png
- Run the command: convert image.png -crop 1536x1536 %d.jpg (Note: if convert does not work, use magick image.png -crop 1536x1536 %d.jpg)
- Once done, it should produce the 12 images that you need.
4. Link panoramas - In order to link these panoramas together, use Autodesk Project Play. Here are detailed instructions for doing that.
Let us know how this works for you in your VR projects.