Content creator woes (Score 1)

I've had a Valve Index for a couple years now. Haven't found anything better.

It's not something you can really do for more than an hour or two at a time, but there are still scenarios in some games like Half Life Alyx and Boneworks that get my heart rate going. I really think that with a few more die shrinks and improvements to screen technologies they're going to start catching on in a big way.

My main complaint at this point, however, is the lack of support for VR for content creators.

As an independent CG artist and animator, I have to say that the tool chain for working with VR isn't great.

Blender (free opensource 3d tool, blender.org) - Has a VR scene viewer, but there is still no way to interact with anything. Blender also allows you to render scenes for VR in Cycles, but there's no way to preview the render that I’ve found, so you have no idea what you're rendering until you spit it out to a file and open it in another tool... For viewing still frames the only tool I've found that lets you adjust the depth in a useful way for compositing shots is Whilrigig (which I highly recommend if you have any interest in VR content creation), and it’s not free.

Preparing video for VR requires you to inject some XML metadata into the video file. Google has made a free tool for doing this, but it's an annoying extra step, and a lot of media players just choose to ignore this and make their own guess as to how depth is setup in the file.

H.265 is the best codec I've found for encoding the fairly large video files you need to utilize the resolution of a Valve Index without an absurd bitrate. It has it's own problems though. Max resolution is 8192 x 4320 pixels. Which sounds like a lot but if you're doing VR video, you have to cut one of those numbers in half for top/bottom or side to side for each eye.

Let’s say you’re doing top/bottom: your individual eye resolution is now at a maximum vertical resolution of 2160 pixels. “Cool!” You think, Valve index vertical resolution is 1440, so we’re good... right? Well, for VR video your vertical field of view is not 180*, on the Index it’s about 108 degrees. So that’s 60%. 60% of 2160 is 1296. So at the absolute limit of the codec, you are having to upscale to fill in the pixels!

Side to side, you’re at 4096X4320, horizontal FOV is about 110*, which is around 31%, so 31% of 4096 is 1252 pixels. Again, we’re up-scaling to fill in the 1600 pixels of horizontal resolution.

Unless I got the math wrong somewhere.. This kinda sucks.

Kodon/other VR sculpting tools – These are great honestly. I love having a virtual ball of clay I can manipulate with natural depth perception. Problem is, sculpting takes a lot of time and I just can’t sit around with this heavy headset on long enough to make any use of these.

Motion capture - Animation Prep Studios product (https://www.patreon.com/prepstudio) is fantastic, and the results you can get out of this are probably going to shake up the industry for much more expensive and cumbersome setups. To be fair, though, I have very little experience with any other setups.

I’m not a professional by any stretch of the imagination, so take this with a grain of salt. If I got the math wrong be gentle It’s early here and I have the dumb.