Rendering passes and compositing in 360º
Once the animation stage was approved I setup the file write node in the compositor, and connecting the output results to their respective node layers on an .exr multi-layered file gave awesome and expected results. Unfortunately the most expected feature provided by Freestyle (Blender’s native render outliner for objects) didn´t work on the 360 camera rendered frames. It only works on regular normal perspective cameras.
I composed the frames into After Effects using Extractor Plugin once all the .exr sequences were ready. In Extractor’s recent versions: you point at a channel (either R,G or B) and it will automatically fill in the other values for you in a pass. You will see this in detail at the conference. I will update this post after the conference with the slides.
So how do you “edit” 360º video in a 2D environment? I resolved to crop an area of the screen which I knew the main focus was, because after all the entire scene will be distorted almost polar like coordinate. The original video didn´t want to include a voice, but we tried a version with voice which is the director´s cut you see on the video link. The editing took around 4 days between revisions and approvals.
Uploading the video for VR and 360º view
The platform to display this work is YouTube. There were a couple of technicalities which I´d like to point during the conference concerning the 360 metadata injector tool from YouTube. The size of the video for this 1 minute and 20 seconds was almost 1GB. I tested the aspect ratio from 16:9 and cinemascope. The final size for the original rendered frames in the end (due to time constraints and deadlines) was HD resolution.
Thank you for subscribing to my blog. I´ll be updating this post with more news, questions, answers and pictures from the conference in the future.
