Quote -
Actually, no, that too is Blender. :woot: The water is a 9-node material. The artist has generously made the scene available for study. You can colour me obsessed. I do realise this is a Poser forum, so I'm not going to try to seduce people over to the 'dark side' but jeez there is some cool stuff available out there. I'm just getting started: so far I haven't hit any walls - if anything, all I'm seeing is further horizons!

Ah, a blender render rendered within a blender render!

Thanks RobynsVeil ;-)

This thread got me to break out my copy of Vue 8 and give it a go on an existing file. Obviously it's going to need work since the scene was never meant to be rendered in panaramic 360! Click the image to open a 4000x2000 jpg.

Good stuff SteveJax. That scene looks like it could work well with some more tweaking :-)

I've been trying to set up a landscape scene with mountains, hills, sea, forming the horizon line, around the outer perimeter of the scene and a flat plane on a slightly raised tabletop style hill in the centre, where the camera is positioned... getting there, I think! 

I seem to have a fairly good shape of terrain now... just trying to get a nice ecosystem / material setup on top of that now.

I'll see how the ongoing render looks tonight. As an experiment I left it rendering at 10k px wide last night... but 6 hours later it was only at 2%. So aborted that one for now and going for another 4k px version... as I'm not even sure what it'll turn out like above a preview grade render yet!

Well As you can see I have the raised center in my scene but only have things in the distance from where the camera would see them if it wasn't taking in the entire panarama. I also need to level it out just a tad it appears. I originally rendered that at 10,000x5000 like you and it was a serious chore that took 24 hours to finish. When next I try, I'll go for the lower resolutions as well.

@Monkeycloud : I already was wondering what your system would do, when rendering a vast ecosystem forest in a 360* setup at 10.000 pix width.

As just my little parkie with some far-away trees  (http://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/index.php?image_id=2275041) took 48 hours, at less than superior quality (broadcast, if I recall), at 5000x7000 size. And my machine is 25% faster too (Vue takes 8 threads / 4 cores max anyway, but I'm running at 4GHz). So a similar render at superior quality (times 2? 4?, say 3) at 10.000 (150% of my 7000) times 125% speed difference will take 48 * 3 * 1,5 * 1,25 = 270 hours (full 100% CPU load, so watch the temp).

Am I crazy? Well, if a full render takes 270 hours, then after 6 hours you will have 6/270 = 2% completion, which is what you found.

The key is: quality reduction. Do you need more than Final for this purpose? And turn ecosystems into 2D equivalents (billboarding) before the final rendering.

have fun

Cool - thanks for the tips aRtBee... billboarding, I wondered what that was. I may have turned it on ;-)

I'm definitely inclined to think some sort of compositing of lower resolution background  with higher resolution foreground, would be the way to go for the full size...

The render time grows exponentially, beyond 4000 px and indeed as soon as the scene has more in it than just a displaced material covered ground plane and an atmosphere.

Whether the compositing is done in Photoshop... or using something from Bagginsbill's ideas around Poser shader nodes... will need to be determined.

I'd have to defer to Bagginsbill or someone else, far more knowledgeable than myself with regard to the latter though... :-)

Billboarding = render first, then put the image on a 2D plane.

Great for far-away stuff in high-res environments. You can make several layers of a different length, which makes any tiling / image repetition less noticeable. And since no Poser render will see the entire sphere at once, repeating elements can be consideren harmless.

BTW: I'll be off for some time, maybe there is some additional help in the Vue forum as well.

Quote - Billboarding = render first, then put the image on a 2D plane.

Great for far-away stuff in high-res environments. You can make several layers of a different length, which makes any tiling / image repetition less noticeable. And since no Poser render will see the entire sphere at once, repeating elements can be consideren harmless.

BTW: I'll be off for some time, maybe there is some additional help in the Vue forum as well.

Yes - indeed - I've checked out the Vue forum a bit so far but not had anything specific to ask as yet...

...lmckenzie, I think it was, also pointed me towards the geekatplay.com Vue tutorials, a while back, in another thread... which are very good too.

Fingers-crossed tonight my current landscape render has turned out acceptably ;-)

then I might try out a Poser render myself with it... as the environment for an idea I had for Bagginsbill and Dreamland's Car Patio and a Tardis..

I'm never sure if I'm using the sphere correctly though. Can someone verify in pp2012, I set the gamma in and out to 1.0, and on the panoramic image, I make the gamma (system) 2.2?

Quote - I'm never sure if I'm using the sphere correctly though. Can someone verify in pp2012, I set the gamma in and out to 1.0, and on the panoramic image, I make the gamma (system) 2.2?

Nice render General ;-)

I may stand corrected in due course... but I'm pretty sure you're right with those gamma settings...

Popping in late in the conversation, but "high-altitude" panoramas over terrain (or even water) would fill a massive gap that currently exists in panomaric images: there are very few around that are taken with an airborne camera (for good technical reasons).

I ran into the problem the other day when I was trying to set up a render of an aircraft in flight using IDL and the envirosphere. You could orient the image well enough to make it look like the aircraft was flying over a valley, but the reflections on the vehicle-- which you could see because the goal was to be close enough to make out the people inside through the windows--showing what was behind the camera, made it quite clear the photographer was on the ground.

Quote - Popping in late in the conversation, but "high-altitude" panoramas over terrain (or even water) would fill a massive gap that currently exists in panomaric images: there are very few around that are taken with an airborne camera (for good technical reasons).

I ran into the problem the other day when I was trying to set up a render of an aircraft in flight using IDL and the envirosphere. You could orient the image well enough to make it look like the aircraft was flying over a valley, but the reflections on the vehicle-- which you could see because the goal was to be close enough to make out the people inside through the windows--showing what was behind the camera, made it quite clear the photographer was on the ground.

Good points. I am definitely planning to try this out, as Khai-J-Bach also suggested along these lines earlier in the thread...

At the moment I am still waiting for a hilly landscape with what will hopefully look like rocks, grass, trees and lakes, to finish rendering at 4000 pixels.

Once I get that down, I could try an aerial camera view of that same terrain... as it uses an infinite terrain plane, as a test of that principle.

Then I was going to try a red desert / barren (Martian?)  alien planet of some sort I think...

:-)

It would be nice to see a step-by-step tutorial of your workflow.  I would greatly be interested to try this at home.

Quote - It would be nice to see a step-by-step tutorial of your workflow.  I would greatly be interested to try this at home.

Are you thinking in terms of setting up a Vue scene right from scratch?

Or just how to set up cameras in an existing scene and adjust the render options?

I suppose covering off scene design considerations that I am finding, relative to making a good scene for this purpose, would be also key part of any tutorial...

Quote - Then I was going to try a red desert / barren (Martian?)  alien planet of some sort I think...

Like this one? Minus the pyramid, of course... :-) 

Quote - > Quote - Then I was going to try a red desert / barren (Martian?)  alien planet of some sort I think...

Like this one? Minus the pyramid, of course... :-) 

Not far off... maybe redder soil and rock, I had in mind... with red agate like boulders in the foreground, and with some kind of alien looking, spindly, stalagmite type rocks / mountains rising from the ground off into and along the horizon line ;-)

Quote - Popping in late in the conversation, but "high-altitude" panoramas over terrain (or even water) would fill a massive gap that currently exists in panomaric images: there are very few around that are taken with an airborne camera (for good technical reasons).

I ran into the problem the other day when I was trying to set up a render of an aircraft in flight using IDL and the envirosphere. You could orient the image well enough to make it look like the aircraft was flying over a valley, but the reflections on the vehicle-- which you could see because the goal was to be close enough to make out the people inside through the windows--showing what was behind the camera, made it quite clear the photographer was on the ground.

If you're thinking of using such a setup for animation I think you'd fail because the closer the arcraft got to the sphere itself the more distorted the image would be. IE: The further you are from where the camera took the image the less real it would look.

When the sphere is several miles in diameter, you can move around a lot without changing perspective.

By default, my EnvSphere has a radius of 750 feet. Change the scale to 1000% (10x) and the surface is more than a mile away from you while still allowing movement within a roughly mile-wide area with little distortion.

But - you will need to increase the Yon value on the camera. This is why I selected 750 feet - so people could use it immediately without changing camera settings.  

Oh I alway thought that was a limit in poser, is there anything negative to consider when increasing the size?

I tend to scale the envsphere up to 1000%... out of habit really a lot of the time. I'm not sure there's necessarily always a benefit in doing this?

Well, as I'm finding in a scene I'm working on at the moment, using one of these Vue panoramas I've made, I'm realising it does affect the position of the horizon line, potentially;

i.e. in the current scene if I make the envsphere 100% scale, the horizon line is hidden behind the wall of the Car Patio set.

If I make it 1000%, I can see the horizon... and therefore some of the ocean.

In terms of camera YON, I've previously found some weirdness, rendering, when trying to scale up really, really big... much above 5000% scale for envsphere, I think... see the linked thread:

http://www.renderosity.com/mod/forumpro/showthread.php?message_id=3902706&ebot_calc_page#message_3902706

(my understanding of Poser measurement units was a bit flawed at the start of that thread by the way - and I think I've subsequently changed to measuring in inches)

Quote - ...on that point, how high should the camera be, ideally, do folk reckon??

Since we must choose, I think just a smidgeon above crotch height is the thing to go for. This will allow a whole standing figure (+hair) to be framed with an approximately equal amount of space above the head and below the feet when the camera is held level with the horizon.

So to put some approximate numbers on this:

0.36 PNU
944.0 mm
37.0 inch

The above is based on the height of the Antonia Polygon figure (roughly 0.7 PNU). In the attached image, the camera is horizontal. If it were any higher or lower, it would start to cut of the feet or head unless it were tilted.

Whilst the above value may be the best general compromise, it certainly would not hurt to have some variety. I sometimes have the camera at knee height or lower, this can be good for glamor, fashion, or action scenes. Or sometimes I like to have the camera at eye height, which can be good if you want to to portray interpersonal stuff between two characters. An even higher POV can be good if you want to portray a group of people, or relationship to the environment.

And I definitely agree with aRtBee, that "for each HDR result it should be clearly documented how high the camera was above the ground when the render was made", perhaps the value in cm or inches could be included in the image file name?

Thanks lesbentley... that's a good idea I think re. putting camera height into the file name.

The other thing I was considering here was whether it might be feasible and if there might be further merit in distriburing the .vue source files... maybe as part of a tutorial in due course...

Anyone using these would have to have the RenderUp module of course... plus any content assets I end up using beyond the standard content package, etc.

But still, I guess some folk may find these of use in due course...

I have switched to rendering these using the Vue batch renderer / RenderCow now... so that is now chugging along in the background producing my tests... at a slower rate... but meaning I can still get on with playing further with compositions in Vue... Posering and, of course, doing a bit of work.

Hopefully get some further results later today... ;-)

Quote - Hopefully get some further results later today... ;-)

Nope... still rendering.

Hopefully get some further results later this week... LOL.

I've gone with the 37 inch camera height suggested by Les, for the currently rendering scene, by the way.

Latest one... and the first with some landscape (and not much else). Well, a pretty rainbow...

The rock isn't quite the colour I was going for.

the camera height should be at 37 inches in this one...however, because we're standing on a hill, with the ground receding away down the hill, before it rises back up into the distant mountain range... well, not sure how that plays out to be honest!

There is an hdr version at 4000 pixels wide here if anyone wants to try that out:

http://bananas.monkeycloud.net/panoramas/beta/

Anyway I'm adjusting the landscape materials and adding some trees to this one then I'll render again.

I'll render the next version out at 10,000 pixels wide. Using the batch renderer that might take a couple of days or more, as processor usage is lower. But for that same reason, if it take a couple of days, it doesn't matter...

You know, I was working on doing these in Poser itself, using a ray-marching cloud shader I made. I was disgusted at the render times (couple hours for 4K by 2K) and gave up. I figured some day I'll get Vue and use that.

But your reports are telling me that Vue isn't any faster. However, it sure does more than my ray marcher.

Yup, Bagginsbill... I reckon that 10k by 5k will likely take around 4 days, maybe more, using Vue's batch render process!

However that is running on about 25% of my processor capacity. So fairly background... Poser, or foreground Vue still runs happily alongside it. As too does the Queue Manager, running at least one Poser render.

So its not problematic... aside from the wait!

Once I've got one or two down at full 10k and get a real idea of the time these are taking I think I will go back to looking at compositing... and do some tests around that... maybe on the basis of the "option 1" you mentioned back on the first page of this thread.

;-)

Quote - This is a reduced size version of one I made in Poser, using a procedural shader and doing the projection math right in the shader.

Very cool :-) As a sky, that's pretty good... and fairly comparable to perhaps a single layer of the cloud forms that are in these Vue renders?

2 hours or so is obviously a lot better than 48 hours... or indeed twice that.

But then, I guess the point of these Vue-made spherical panoramas is that they're pre-baked... its just a case of finding the best way to pre-bake them at sufficient resolution?

10K by 5K is 50 megapixels - now way around that I suppose.

If a 4K sky render takes me 2 hours, then the 10K will take at least 12.

But - that's doing it as a Poser shader. I have thought about building a custom renderer in C++ that only does this one thing - make panoramas.

Quote - 10K by 5K is 50 megapixels - now way around that I suppose.

If a 4K sky render takes me 2 hours, then the 10K will take at least 12.

But - that's doing it as a Poser shader. I have thought about building a custom renderer in C++ that only does this one thing - make panoramas.

Wow! That sounds like a mammoth undertaking? Had you envisaged encompassing things like "atmospherics" and so forth? Were you planning just to generate cloudcapes with it, or terrain as well?

Certainly an impressive feat to pull off if you can do this!

One thing I would say, is that part of the reason my current renders are taking the time they are is that I'm also rendering a ground plane mesh... first it was a sea plane mesh with additional displacement... and now its an elaborate "infinite" plane terrain mesh.

If I just rendered a sky in Vue, the time would be substantially reduced. Not sure by how much... but more than half, I think.

It is probably worth an experiment along these lines perhaps before I do another landscape. Just to see how long a 10k cloudscape by itself would take...

The terrain is not the expensive part - it's the volumetric clouds. The shader I wrote samples a layer of the atmosphere. Within that layer (3000 to 6000 feet) I was sampling 20 points (3D volume points of the procedural pattern) to assemble each pixel.

20 is not enough to get rid of all sampling artifacts. At 100 samples, it totally is clean, but it's very slow - obviously 5x slower. My 2K image would be 10 hours. The full size 10K would be 63 hours.

But if I built a customized renderer that did that and nothing else, I figure I can make it 1000 times faster.

So more like four minutes???

In that case you could build substantially more complex panoramas within a very very reasonable time!

I suppose it could perhaps, potentially be controlled by a Python script from within Poser too, which could send coordinates of your scene's "sun" light position in the sky, relative to the envsphere... would this be possible?

But I guess it all depends on how long building the custom render engine would take you to do?

Quote - So more like four minutes???

In that case you could build substantially more complex panoramas within a very very reasonable time!

I suppose it could perhaps, potentially be controlled by a Python script from within Poser too, which could send coordinates of your scene's "sun" light position in the sky, relative to the envsphere... would this be possible?

But I guess it all depends on how long building the custom render engine would take you to do?

How cool would that be. Set up the Sun /lighting where you want then make the sky to match, including the angle of the camera. Then pop it onto the sphere. How realistic is that though?

Hmmm... MissNancy has kindly checked and pointed out in another thread that the HDRs I've managed to output so far are not encompassing the full dynamic range, for some reason...

So I will need to investigate this... either I've done something silly when I've reviewed the HDRs in Photoshop (at which point I made the lower res jpeg copies) or else there is a further option in the Vue render settings that I've overlooked perhaps...

I remembered this thread from last year, and am digging it up to ask...how did it work out?  Did you make your freebies, or do the tutorial? 

Quote - I remembered this thread from last year, and am digging it up to ask...how did it work out?  Did you make your freebies, or do the tutorial? 

I just got a handful of panoramas done so far... the big issue I was hitting was with regard to render times for getting the kind of sizes I was initially aiming for... e.g. 10-12K pixel plus wide.

My Vue install has also been screwed since I tried to apply the last service pack... and with becoming a dad again in March, I've been kind of short of Poser / Vue / 3D time too... so not had time to sort it...

...but in due course I was planning to do some more on this.

Following some discussions and one or two other threads, advice from BB, last year, I'd gotten to the point of deciding that the best approach is to make two renders of my Vue scenes... and go down a more "theatrical" route...

I've been doing a 4K wide (or less even) spherical panorama, and a hi res backdrop (e.g. in IMAX format or similar) which can be mapped on a flat rectangular (maybe slightly convex) primitive prop.

The spherical then provides reflections and IDL... the backdrop, well provides the backdrop.

The render time is much more reasonable...

Of course, this approach works for the kinds of scenes I currently do in Poser. But other folk might well be looking for a more immersive 360 environment type of thing from the spherical panorama approach...

Congratulations on your new little monkey. :-)

Quote - Congratulations on your new little monkey. :-)

Thanks EnglishBob! :)