Efficient Spherical Panorama Sampling

[im.thatoneguy]

It would be great if you could render in cubemap space and then have Vray's VFB do the conversion to Spherical. It would reduce massssssive wasted sampling on the poles while still letting the output process be straightforward.

Also, any plans to offer a "lightfield" system for seated head parallax movement?

[vlado]

Why don't you render to spherical image directly? The result will be the same.

We are playing with some ideas regarding parallax, but nothing useful yet.

Best regards,
Vlado

[im.thatoneguy]

Why don't you render to spherical image directly? The result will be the same.

Render efficiency. If I need a spherical that is 4k wide I have to render 4k x 2k = 8mpx. If I render the same as a cube map it's (1k x 1k x 6) = 6MPX, 25% render time reduction for no quality loss. The noise sampling is also more regular since the poles aren't mega oversampled (extreme case would be the up/down poles which have perhaps 8,160x super sampling (an entire row of pixels) for a single pixel in perspective space while the parts that are "interesting" across the horizon are relatively undersampled in the spherical map.