Any way to render a 360/latlong flipbook?

[localstarlight]

I am making an animatic for a dome show which is a 360/latlong format. It's extremely high resolution, so I'd love to take advantage of the flipbook function in Houdini for the animatic, but since it uses the viewer, even when using a camera setup to be 360, the output is still a standard perspective view. So I guess there's two questions:

1. Is there any way to get the scene viewer to show the camera view in the correct perspective (spherical/latlong) instead of perspective when using that kind of camera?

2. Is there any way to use a ROP node to render the spherical/latlong frame in a low-res OpenGL-style way that is as quick as using a flipbook?

[jjakob]

I'm not sure you can get the viewer to display in latlong but there is an opengl ROP that you can use. Depending on the settings it should be almost as fast as a default flipbook.

[localstarlight]

Hey, thanks for the response.

Have been trying to use the OpenGL ROP actually, but it also doesn't seem to render a 360/latlong image. I have camera set up as a Polar (Panoramic) projection, but the OpenGL ROP just renders it as a standard perspective camera.

[sebkaine]

https://www.tokeru.com/cgwiki/HoudiniOculusWip

some good info. i would say no you can't by default. but you can setup a 6 cam rig with a 90 fov for each cam, and stitch them with a batch process using isixpack or any other cubemap2latlong command line tool.

if you want to work directly in VR like in maya / blender where you move object and see all directly in your hmd , i don't think it's possible. 

[localstarlight]

Thanks for that.

I haven't tested that out yet, but I feel like rendering 6 cameras out and stitching them together might end up taking almost as long as the basic render I'm trying to do anyway, but I will look into it.

 

[sebkaine]

well my advise for VR HMD / Viewport / realtime stuff like this , do yourself a favor and forget Houdini and go with unity / unreal + hengine if you can

check out all the stuff from Simon Verstraete it's pure gold

Tutorials | SideFX

Edited October 10, 2023 by sebkaine