I wish you could see what I've seen: Stonemason's Chinatown in VR on the Oculus Rift.

CypherFOX

Greetings,

Qualifier

So...I need to qualify this; I did this for personal use only.  And if you have a Vive or Rift, you should too.  You obviously can't make a real product out of this without getting the appropriate Stonemason license.  I do have the appropriate DAZ license, but there aren't as many sets of that caliber that are DAZ O's.  I'll probably try it with a Jack Tomalin set next.

The Steps

In Unity, I created a new project, and had experimented a little bit with getting it to run in VR.  I followed these steps.

I loaded up in DAZ Studio the Stonemason set Chinatown and I picked the 3DL mode because I felt it'd export better.  Just an instinct; not sure if it's true.

File | Export...  Selected Autodesk FBX (*.fbx), Entered 'Chinatown' as the name of the file.  I already had the Unity project up, so I saved it into the Assets directory of that project.

Select only 'Props', Output Options: FBX 2014 - Binary

The checkboxes enabled were:

• Embed Textures
• Collect Textures To Folder (was marked by default and couldn't be turned off, but that's okay)
• Merge Diffuse and Opacity Textures
• Merge Clothing into Figure Skeleton (probably didn't matter)
• Allow Degraded Skinning
• Allow Degraded Scaling

Nothing else was checked.  I hit 'Accept', and waited until it was done.  I switched to Unity, and it automatically recognized the changes and imported all of it.  It prompted to mark the Normal textures as Normals, and I okayed that.

There was now an Asset named 'Chinatown', and I dragged it into the scene and...there it was.  I adjusted the position so I knew the ground was at zero.  My camera was at 1.8 meters, which is roughly 5'10" up, which was a bit short, but worked for me.  I pressed the 'Run' button and put the Oculus Rift on...and I was in a Stonemason city.  Just.  Like.  That.

The Result

I wish everybody could look around like that...it's amazing.  I haven't written any code to be able to move around yet, but movement and maybe some distant city sounds, and it'd feel mighty real...and I'm sure there's more I could do to the textures...but for now, it's ASTOUNDING how it feels to be INSIDE a Stonemason set.

If you have an Oculus Rift or Vive, everything else's free (except the Stonemason set, of course) so don't hesitate to try it!

--  Morgan

 

Bartleby

I tried this with a Future City set by Stonemason and agree that it is amazing.  Just drop an FPS controller prefab in and you can move around with the keyboard. Don't forget to set collider on for the set first or you will fall straight through. 

I have not played with them yet but the free Oculus Dev kit has a load of city ambient sounds to play with. 

Stonemason

it really is awesome viewing these environments in VR,I've tried a few in Unity but this week just started using Octane to render spherical stereo renders,not quite the same in that you cant navigate around the scene..but still gives that wonderful sense of scale and depth..I do wish Iray could render them though,while Octane is fine I do prefer using Iray

RobotHeadArt

Stonemason said:

it really is awesome viewing these environments in VR,I've tried a few in Unity but this week just started using Octane to render spherical stereo renders,not quite the same in that you cant navigate around the scene..but still gives that wonderful sense of scale and depth..I do wish Iray could render them though,while Octane is fine I do prefer using Iray

This was added in the latest update to Iray in the recent DAZ Studio update.  The settings are on the camera under the Lens section.  Lens Distortion Type has sphereical.  There was another forum member that posted a 3d fly through Youtube video of the secret lair product using it.

Stonemason

was that a very recent update?..I tried I think a couple weeks ago to get it working but there is a bug in the method,when looking forward you get the 3d depth effect,but towards the sides the effect dissapears and when looking behind the 3d effect is inverted,

 

RobotHeadArt said:

Stonemason said:

it really is awesome viewing these environments in VR,I've tried a few in Unity but this week just started using Octane to render spherical stereo renders,not quite the same in that you cant navigate around the scene..but still gives that wonderful sense of scale and depth..I do wish Iray could render them though,while Octane is fine I do prefer using Iray

This was added in the latest update to Iray in the recent DAZ Studio update.  The settings are on the camera under the Lens section.  Lens Distortion Type has sphereical.  There was another forum member that posted a 3d fly through Youtube video of the secret lair product using it.

 

wiz

RobotHeadArt said:

Stonemason said:

it really is awesome viewing these environments in VR,I've tried a few in Unity but this week just started using Octane to render spherical stereo renders,not quite the same in that you cant navigate around the scene..but still gives that wonderful sense of scale and depth..I do wish Iray could render them though,while Octane is fine I do prefer using Iray

This was added in the latest update to Iray in the recent DAZ Studio update.  The settings are on the camera under the Lens section.  Lens Distortion Type has sphereical.  There was another forum member that posted a 3d fly through Youtube video of the secret lair product using it.

What you descrive is a single-point stereo render. There is a big difference between that and what Stonemason described. That requires the scene to be rendered from side-by-side camera positions, displaced perpendicular to vertical slices of an image. imagine a pair of cameras diametrically opposed on a circle, then rotate the circle to produce hundreds, or thousands of views, possibly just 1 pixel wide, i,e, a 2kx4k cylindrical rectilinear projection might consist of 4,000 renders, each 2000 pixels high, and just 1 pixel wide.

It takes brilliant programming of the render engine to make this happen efficiently.

Stonemason

 I've read a few engines that are doing it in slices,Octane doesnt seem to be rendering in slices though,It's rendering side by side stereo speherical all in one image,so what I get out of Octane goes direct to the Vive for viewing,no need for secondary apps to stitch the two images together..it's very user freindly

wiz said:

RobotHeadArt said:

Stonemason said:

it really is awesome viewing these environments in VR,I've tried a few in Unity but this week just started using Octane to render spherical stereo renders,not quite the same in that you cant navigate around the scene..but still gives that wonderful sense of scale and depth..I do wish Iray could render them though,while Octane is fine I do prefer using Iray

This was added in the latest update to Iray in the recent DAZ Studio update.  The settings are on the camera under the Lens section.  Lens Distortion Type has sphereical.  There was another forum member that posted a 3d fly through Youtube video of the secret lair product using it.

What you descrive is a single-point stereo render. There is a big difference between that and what Stonemason described. That requires the scene to be rendered from side-by-side camera positions, displaced perpendicular to vertical slices of an image. imagine a pair of cameras diametrically opposed on a circle, then rotate the circle to produce hundreds, or thousands of views, possibly just 1 pixel wide, i,e, a 2kx4k cylindrical rectilinear projection might consist of 4,000 renders, each 2000 pixels high, and just 1 pixel wide.

It takes brilliant programming of the render engine to make this happen efficiently.

 

nonesuch00

Some guy from Octane did a game rendering presentation that Octane was working on for the Unity engine and it involves streaming. When Octane is integrated into Unity it will be able to do traditional still and animation rendering too. It is due to be in Unity 2017.x Beta this year in fact from what he said.

Being as it will be free in the Unity engine and the Octane Renderer cost like $800 everywhere else I've seen it used I'm wondering what difference in functionality between the two they've either failed to mention or I didn't understand.

Leonides02

Stonemason said:

 I've read a few engines that are doing it in slices,Octane doesnt seem to be rendering in slices though,It's rendering side by side stereo speherical all in one image,so what I get out of Octane goes direct to the Vive for viewing,no need for secondary apps to stitch the two images together..it's very user freindly

wiz said:

RobotHeadArt said:

Stonemason said:

it really is awesome viewing these environments in VR,I've tried a few in Unity but this week just started using Octane to render spherical stereo renders,not quite the same in that you cant navigate around the scene..but still gives that wonderful sense of scale and depth..I do wish Iray could render them though,while Octane is fine I do prefer using Iray

This was added in the latest update to Iray in the recent DAZ Studio update.  The settings are on the camera under the Lens section.  Lens Distortion Type has sphereical.  There was another forum member that posted a 3d fly through Youtube video of the secret lair product using it.

What you descrive is a single-point stereo render. There is a big difference between that and what Stonemason described. That requires the scene to be rendered from side-by-side camera positions, displaced perpendicular to vertical slices of an image. imagine a pair of cameras diametrically opposed on a circle, then rotate the circle to produce hundreds, or thousands of views, possibly just 1 pixel wide, i,e, a 2kx4k cylindrical rectilinear projection might consist of 4,000 renders, each 2000 pixels high, and just 1 pixel wide.

It takes brilliant programming of the render engine to make this happen efficiently.

 

I'm interested in this as well, Stonemason. I have Octane and it doesn't seem to be doing anything magical to achieve the spherical stereoscopic effect. Is there any reason to believe we couldn't rig up some settings for Iray to achieve the same result?

Stonemason

I think whatever magic is going on is under the hood,

here's an example of one from Octane:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/fy1qje3dthpzt98/254k.png?dl=0

Leonides02

Stonemason said:

I think whatever magic is going on is under the hood,

here's an example of one from Octane:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/fy1qje3dthpzt98/254k.png?dl=0

Thanks, Stonemason. Hm... is that really not achievable with two spherical cameras set a couple centimeters apart? I don't see why... Maybe I'll do some tests with Octane and Iray and compare them in PS to see what the difference is.  

Stonemason

there is a rig like that someone posted on the forum..but the problem was no depth at the sides and inverted depth behind the viewer,it only works when facing forward.

Ivy

CypherFOX said:

Greetings,

Qualifier

So...I need to qualify this; I did this for personal use only.  And if you have a Vive or Rift, you should too.  You obviously can't make a real product out of this without getting the appropriate Stonemason license.  I do have the appropriate DAZ license, but there aren't as many sets of that caliber that are DAZ O's.  I'll probably try it with a Jack Tomalin set next.

The Steps

In Unity, I created a new project, and had experimented a little bit with getting it to run in VR.  I followed these steps.

I loaded up in DAZ Studio the Stonemason set Chinatown and I picked the 3DL mode because I felt it'd export better.  Just an instinct; not sure if it's true.

File | Export...  Selected Autodesk FBX (*.fbx), Entered 'Chinatown' as the name of the file.  I already had the Unity project up, so I saved it into the Assets directory of that project.

Select only 'Props', Output Options: FBX 2014 - Binary

The checkboxes enabled were:

• Embed Textures
• Collect Textures To Folder (was marked by default and couldn't be turned off, but that's okay)
• Merge Diffuse and Opacity Textures
• Merge Clothing into Figure Skeleton (probably didn't matter)
• Allow Degraded Skinning
• Allow Degraded Scaling

Nothing else was checked.  I hit 'Accept', and waited until it was done.  I switched to Unity, and it automatically recognized the changes and imported all of it.  It prompted to mark the Normal textures as Normals, and I okayed that.

There was now an Asset named 'Chinatown', and I dragged it into the scene and...there it was.  I adjusted the position so I knew the ground was at zero.  My camera was at 1.8 meters, which is roughly 5'10" up, which was a bit short, but worked for me.  I pressed the 'Run' button and put the Oculus Rift on...and I was in a Stonemason city.  Just.  Like.  That.

The Result

I wish everybody could look around like that...it's amazing.  I haven't written any code to be able to move around yet, but movement and maybe some distant city sounds, and it'd feel mighty real...and I'm sure there's more I could do to the textures...but for now, it's ASTOUNDING how it feels to be INSIDE a Stonemason set.

If you have an Oculus Rift or Vive, everything else's free (except the Stonemason set, of course) so don't hesitate to try it!

--  Morgan

 

I bough China town, I used it in a animations once.   I love to use it to make background with.

 

Its a Awesome set. so I bet it does look really fantastic in VR,  I have a question?  doesn't Carrara have spherical camera's  that can be used to create vr? I thought I seen Wendy do something with Carrara and VR. maybe you could try using carrara if you have it

Leonides02

Stonemason said:

there is a rig like that someone posted on the forum..but the problem was no depth at the sides and inverted depth behind the viewer,it only works when facing forward.

Yeah, I came actoss that as well. But why isn't this a problem with Octane? That's why I'd like to run a comparison and see what's happening. 

Mada

Unity uses PBR so the iray textures should work better. A peculiarity of VR is that normal maps close up makes it look wrong so I usually delete normal maps from the textures. You can take it a step further and download the VRTK asset from the store (https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/64131), open up one of the sample scenes with VR navigation already set up and drag the exported model into that. Then you can actually teleport and walk around in the set :)

FirePro9

Stonemason said:

there is a rig like that someone posted on the forum..but the problem was no depth at the sides and inverted depth behind the viewer,it only works when facing forward.

Many of the 360 video cameras use two semi-spherical lens, one facing front and one facing back.  Stitching two semi-spherical stereo images together may not help the side views but might fix the the focus flipping when looking behind you.