Users of Cinema 4D Release 19 visualize
and studio editions can now directly
render stereo spherical images for use
in virtual reality and dome projections.
And this is all accomplished through the
spherical controls that have been added to
the camera object. So with any camera
that's already been positioned and
animated, you can go into the "Spherical"
tab and simply check the "Enable" box.
Now you can see that by default this
renders an equirectangular lat/long
image. This basically takes the full
360-degree view around the camera and maps
it onto a plane. We can take the same
projection and map it onto a C4D sky
object or a sphere and we'd essentially
have an HDR sky. This is the most popular
mapping type for 360-degree videos because
it fits into our standard 16 by 9 frame
aspects pretty well. The problem is
that it introduces a bit of distortion
especially at the poles, and cubic
mapping can help to minimize that
distortion. So, Cinema 4D also supports a
number of different cube mapping formats.
The string format maps all of the faces
of the cube in a horizontal line,
and this as well as the equirectangular
format, are supported in the standard and
physical render as well as pro render. Now
if you're the standard or physical render,
there's a couple of additional mapping
types you can use, including the cross
mapping type that's used by Mettle Skybox
Studio and other compositing applications.
And also the three by two cube map that's
used internally by Facebook for all of
their 360-degree videos. This format is
great because it efficiently maps all of
the faces of a cube into a fairly usable
aspect ratio. Now, of course,
when you're rendering VR images,
you need to do that in stereo,
and the stereoscopic tab automatically
updates when spherical is active, to
provide you with special options for
spherical rendering. You can render proper
360-degrees stereo in either parallel or
toe-in mode. And you can lay out the
images either in top-bottom or
side-by-side format, or simply render the
left or the right eye. Let's go ahead and
switch back into Lat/Long mode so that
you can see the typical output that
you would use for YouTube VR.
Now, here in the stereo settings
you can set the eye separation,
which would typically be 6.5 centimeters,
but I've scaled it here based on the scale
of my scene. You can also set the
eye-to-neck distance. You also have the
options to enable Pole Smoothing, which
minimizes distortion at the top and the
bottom of the image that is created
by the stereo offset of the cameras.
And you have the typical options
here with Pole Smoothing to use
linear or exponential algorithms.
And, of course, you can set the angle at
which that smoothing begins to occur, as
well as the exponent that's used to
determine the curve of that smoothing.
Now we also had the option in the
spherical tab to limit the range of the
render. This essentially gives you
the ability to do a render region on
specific latitude and longitude. So,
here we're limiting to just the front 180
degrees as well as the 60 degrees in
the center of latitude and longitude.
But you can, of course, adjust this
however you'd like to render a specific
region of the frame. Now, when you use the
Fit Frame option, it's going to take that
region that you're rendering
and scale it to the full image size.
So you can easily render something like
a 270-degree or 180-degree video.
To help you dial-in these ranges, the
spherical camera has an FOV helper and
this is something that you won't see with
the interactive render region active and
you also won't see when you're looking
through the spherical camera.
So we'll jump out into the editor camera
and you can see this representation here
in the editor. This is what would normally
appear as a camera object that shows the
field of view of the camera. But when
the spherical camera is active,
it appears as a spherical representation
of the area that will be rendered.
So, you can see that as we adjust
the longitude as well as the latitude,
it will actually show us what portion of
the scene will be rendered with those
settings. Now if you're simply rendering a
basic dome projection, you can change this
FOV Helper to a dome and, in that case, it
simplifies these settings so that you only
have to worry about the latitude, and
you'll see a representation of the dome
itself. So that's a quick overview of some
of the options that are available in the
new spherical camera in Cinema 4D Release
19. Now, I've been showing all of this
with the physical render, but I also
want to mention that the standard renderer
has had a great speed enhancement in
Cinema 4D Release 19, specifically in
scenes that have a lot of reflection and
transparency. And in fact, this particular
scene renders about two times faster in
the standard renderer with Release 19 than
it did in Release 18. And, of course,
there's lots of enhancements big and small
in Cinema 4D Release 19, so make sure to
view all of our videos here on Cineversity
as well as the Quick Tips and Reference
videos that will be coming in the next few
months, so that you can learn all of
the power that is available to you
in the latest edition of Cinema 4D.
