Tut mcjVRKit For Daz Studio 1.8

Tutorial written while making the DS 1/2 version of the kit

1 load an mcjSkySphere prop

https://sites.google.com/site/mcasualsdazscripts5/mcjskysphere

set the skySphere Ambient strength to 100%, set the diffuse strength at 0%

set the skySphere "Cast Shadows" Parameter setting to OFF

so the sphere will not be affected by the scene lighting and wont block the sunlight

i applied an environment by Blochi from the sIBL archive http://www.hdrlabs.com/sibl/archive.html ( CC License attribution non-commercial share-alike )

here's a 3Delight render from far away,

2 - build a scene

The camera i use to setup my scene is at 0, 0, 0 at the exact scenter of the sky sphere

i make it a 35mm camera to get a wider field of vision

experimentally i figured that the camera was about 6 ft above the ground

So i moved Aiko's ground level at -200cm

3 - Build the twin-fisheye camera

a) i load an mcjBiConvexMirror prop from Poser Content/Props/mCasual

b) select the mirror and apply the 3Delight-compatible mirror material mcjMirrorMaterialDS1 from Daz Studio Content/Presets/material/mcasual

c) run the script mcjHemiCamBottomDS1.ds and mcjHemiCamTopDS1.ds which will create the two cameras that are pointing at the mirror.

The adjustments for those cameras are very special, so you should not use a standard camera and try to wing it.

set the render size to a square ratio, example: 1920 x 1920

set the render engine to 3Delight since openGL doesnt render mirrors

note about the cameras

The mirror occupies 3994x3994 pixels of a 4000x4000 render frame

The mirror was inflated to cover slightly more than 180 degrees

The re-map-and-stitch panel props sample the fisheye images radially from 0 to 360 degrees and the radius sampling goes from 0 98.4%

so the fisheye image probably covers a field of view of 182.9268 degrees.

Render your 2 fisheye images or your 2 sequences of fisheye images

4 - Re-mapping and stitching the fisheye image pairs to get equirectangualr images suitable for VR/360 displays

start with an empty scene

load an mcjFishToEqui400 prop found in your poser content in the Props / mcasual folder

apply the camera creation preset mcjRemapAndStitchCameraPresetDS1 found in your Daz Studio content in the Presets / Cameras / mCasual folder

set the Render engine to OpenGl or 3Delight

Set a 2-to-1rendered image ratio, example: 3840x1920

the mcjFishToEqui400 should perfectly fill the rendering frame

if you only have 1 photosphere to render, you could apply your top fisheye image to the mcjFishToEqui400Top panel and the bottom fisheye image to the mcjFishToEqui400Bot panel

If you are dealing with sequences of images, run the mcjRemapAndStitchCameraDS1 script found in your Daz Studio Content in the Scripts/mCasual folder.

select one of your top fisheye images and one of your bottom fisheye images

use the "render" buttons and the re-mapped-and stitched images will be rendered to disk