Stereoscopic VR movie quality...what to do?

[ben_hamburg]

Hey,

so we recently got a client request for a VR presentation of a project.
We filmed a moderator in front of a greeenscreen and put him on a plane in the 3D Set.

So far so good.
But the quality is still very poor...here is our workflow:

1. Rendered at 4320x4320 (adjust resolution in the Vray stereoscopic helper was off) as spherical panorama with Top/Bottom.
2. Squashed to 3840X1920 (top/Bottom) and encoded as MP4 with 10-20 Mbps.

The result is quite blurry and pixelated.

We pretty much followed the Vray VR Guide, so the conclusion is that thats just the maximum quality possible for stereoscopic 360 movies right now.

So now we?re trying to figure out how to improve the experience with the current limitations:

1. Do you know of any apps or tools that would allow to use 6 by 1 cubemaps instead and simply put some video overlay on top? All we found was this:
http://www.instavr.co/

It looks like it could do the trick, but 300 bucks/ months seems a bit excessive if you don?t exclusively deal in VR epxeriences...
Also I?m not sure it would be possible to include video with transparency like our moderator.

2. Are there any new techniqes when creating stereoscopic VR renderings?

[sheehan_partners_nm]

I know Mettle Skybox plugins for Premiere and AfterEffects can convert cubemaps, but I have never tried them personally. Maybe get e demo version and give it a shot

[ben_hamburg]

Yeah, they just got aquired by Adobe...But it also doesn?t change the need for an app to do the overlay...

I read up some more on the VR quality stuff and 2160 vertical height is just the OS limitation on android devices right now. there can probably still be gained some quality by increasing the bitrate to about 40 Mpbs, but other than that thats just what the client is gonna get right now. Blurry with jagged edges, but still pretty immersive and cool...

It probably also works better for content that has a little more textures and interesting materials that distract from the quality, with mostly plain grey materials and simple CAD forms the technical limitations are just gonna be more prominent...

[sheehan_partners_nm]

Yea...making VR animations is a pain in the butt. Also flickering for some reason was bigger in my experience. I hope you went with Brute force to reduce it.
Another limitation i found in my experience was: a cubemap with high quality would be at least 1500x18000 pixels.
There is no decoder that would allow you to export a frame more than 4096 pixels wide, which makes cubemaps useless (i learned it the hard way)
Second lesson learned, Oculus video player wont read a video sequence made of cubemaps (top bottom or side by side).
Long story short, for VR animations you are stuck with spherical panoramas which are low-res, blurry, don't have straight lines, and suck.

[ben_hamburg]

Well, cubemaps wouldn?t be for animation but for the App approach: Using the high def cubemap as backdrop still images and just using some overlays. This way you wouldn?t be stuck with the encoding restrictions, but like I said, I don?t wanna pay a monthly subscription for that and I?m not even sure it would work the way I am imagining it.

[sheehan_partners_nm]

VRto.me ?

[ben_hamburg]

Well, thay let you upload Cubemaps and link them via hotspots, but thats about it. No Overlays, be they static or video...It also looks like InstaVR is not the solution, as far as I?ve understood they don?t let you use cubemaps directly, but you?re supposed to convert them to spherical latlong first via Autodesk 360.

We sold it to the client for now as "Status quo"...VR is still cool enough to be a selling point, even if the quality is lacking behind 2D CGI for now...