Showcase Info you will want to save, if you ever want to produce a 360 video

In this posting I share my experience producing a marketing video for a VR-based game, and provide a link to a document you’ll want to hang onto in case you ever need to make a 360 video.

My goal was to produce a 360 degree immersive video, to showcase the graphics from a recently published VR game. The project turned out to be MUCH harder than expected.

We spent weeks agonizing over blurry videos. There were endless cycles of rendering videos, uploading them to YouTube, viewing them on YouTube, viewing them inside a headset, being horrified by the result, and going back to square one. We did a lot of googling and read every forum posting we could find.

Early in the project I encouraged our team to “give up”. I looked at the various 360 videos that are out there and was not impressed. The videos that seemed to work best were videos from roller coaster rides, where most of the sky was solid blue. The main secret to success was clearly “don’t let much of the screen update.” That wouldn’t work for us. Most of our game takes place underground. Moving the camera through a cave means every pixel getting updated.

The final result is not perfect, but I am comfortable saying that a better 360-degree video could not have been made. Our artist, Jayson Bennett nailed it!

This is a link to the video we produced:

And, this is a link to a document describing the process we used to produce the video:

https://www.colossalcave3d.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/Jayson-360-Video-Breakdown.pdf

I hope that this document will save you a LOT of time.

-Ken Williams
Cygnus Entertainment

 

You wrote...
"Because my computer can’t handle the realtime render in
Unity’s Editor at a consistent quality, I opted to render out a JPG image sequence at 30FPS"

Maybe the OP should consider updating their hardware.?
This "method" seems a bit old fashioned, time consuming and a bit clumsy. Most of us are now using up-to-date recorders that would circumvent your method. There are many of these in the Store that do VR, and of reasonable price. They also do "off line" recording as well to correct drop outs etc with any complex hi-res frames. But if you're strapped for cash and still using "old" hardware etc then your hints will probably help.