HOW DO I RENDER PANORAMIC IMAGES USING V-RAY?
Shirley Rodriguez, USA
What a great question. Rendering panoramic images has never been as easy as it is now. The requirement and desire for 360-degree interaction of both photography and rendered images has never been greater. I’ll assume from the question that once you’ve got your panoramic image you know what to do with it! If that’s a bad assumption, then I’ve put a little tip together for you (see right) in case you need a helping hand.
In V-ray, there is one workflow to follow, but there are two potential outputs. Let’s look at the workflow to start with. Start by heading to the Render Setup dialog box and making sure that V-ray is the selected renderer. Select the V-ray tab and scroll down to the Camera rollout. This rollout enables you to apply effects directly to your camera output, such as motion blur and depth of field, as well as control the type of camera and its field of view. It is this last section that we’re interested in.
Using the Type drop down, you’ll see a list of camera types. There is a huge variety! We are mostly interested in the Spherical Panorama and Cube 6x1 options. The first option gives you independent horizontal and vertical field of view control, which enables you to create lat/long images for spherical VR use. If you want
your render to show the full horizontal rotation, then you’ll need to override the FOV to 360 degrees.
The second option, which I use all the time, is Cube 6x1. This is very similar to the standard box camera, but rather than a single view, it will output six different views as per the six sides of a cube. The six views are all lined up horizontally, and there is no gap or overlap between each view (see image above). The six squares therefore give you a perfect 360-degree representation of your scene. The output from this will feed directly into a program such as Krpano, which relies on having six individual square images.