VR yes or no?

[innerdream]

I just spent the week on a UE4 scene, granted I'm not an expert in the software and have not used it in about 6 months. Anyhow, is VR too new to make it viable for commercial rendering artists? In other words is there too much labor involved to make the cost affordable on a large scale?

Edited October 10, 2016 by innerdream

[Francisco Penaloza]

Hi Rober,

from my experience VR is here to stay, we like it or not, looking carefully all around you'll see this is not a fail trend like it was Stereoscopic 3D, or 3D TV and movies. VR Will have many more applications besides entertainment, and that's the strength of it.

Having said that, We as Visualization professional should at least look in to the process of creation of VR/360 presentations and and see if it can fit in our workflow and budget.

I work in a fast moving production environment. and Yes we can fit VR/360 in our presentation, but they are not all flashy Unreal presentations.

It seems that in our community Unreal becomes a sim of VR and this is wrong. There are an increasing number of VR/360 tools that can fit with not much overload in a design process and production process. Of course you can do the "final" all flashy Unreal VR presentation but to me that it is like doing animation, not for every client, not for every project.

I Have prepared a few VR/360 presentation already, in different design stages and even tho the quality varies depending of the software all of them had produced a great feedback from designers and clients.

Not all VR presentation has to be a "Scandinavian minimalist room"

Let me know if you need more info PM me

[innerdream]

That's a good point that they don't all need to be photo real. I need to think about how to sell that. Most clients see the super slick UE4 VR on YouTube and they want that but don't want to pay for that! Hahaha...*sigh*

[Francisco Penaloza]

Well everybody want to create a lord of the ring animation but for sure they don't have the budget for it

I guess it depend what you want to sell really. For a one men business doing Unreal VR is very time consuming. for a small team it become faster and more affordable. Stingray has better integration with Autodesk ecosystem and that make it faster than Unreal for arch Viz. Quality is not there, but is not that far either. There are other app that give you good image quality and faster turn around, but you loose some interactivity.

But this is the thing, have you tried a good VR headset?? such HTC Vive or Oculus riff??

When you are in a VR environment with a good headset and good performance, the quality of images goes to a second stage. We use Prospect here at my company and none of our clients or designers complains about image quality. The feeling of immersion totally sell the experience.

Of course when I do something on Stingray, they like better because they can see reflections and shiny surfaces, better GI and all that that Unreal also give you. But again, when using a good hardware and not just a flat 360 panorama, it really give you a great experience.

 

All this in a design environment works great. If you want to sell a product to a end user, such realtors or people en general well then the competition for higher visual quality is bigger. But still people get impressed every time with simple shaders but good performance.

[innerdream]

All this in a design environment works great. If you want to sell a product to a end user, such realtors or people en general well then the competition for higher visual quality is bigger. But still people get impressed every time with simple shaders but good performance.

 

I don't work in a design office anymore, I don't see myself doing that again. The nice thing about a well made Unreal project is you can grab as many still images as you want along with video and the VR.

 

I've never tried a good headset, I'm just using Unreal for basic animations at the moment.

[philippelamoureux]

I've tried VR with the htc vive (courtesy of Epic Games).

 

It was very fun during the design process. Looking around everywhere, lying on the floor, looking underneath the couch, etc. You get the idea. It's VERY immersive but...

 

For marketing purposes, the effort required to bring a VR ''clay model'' to a polished photoreal experience is huge. Add a couple trees in your scene and you'll dip below the minimum comfortable level, etc.

 

So in my opinion, it's gonna stay in the architect's office and gonna be used for the design phase. For marketing we'll stick to images and movies.

 

Rafael Reis of Ue4arch sent me his Barcelona VR app. It was immersive and fun but he had to cut a lot of eye candy (glass reflection mostly) that his cinematic movie had. The cinematic movie of the pavillion was incredible imo. This is not the kind of project we receive on daily basis though.

 

Another problem right now is how clunky the whole vr setup is. It's not comfortable, it's heavy, there are 56 000 wires and you need space and a big computer. Too complicated to sell to a newbie client imo. Again, this is for the architecture/design offices!

 

I'm not spending another second on vr until epic release their official ''foward renderer'' so that performance is much better. (that's already planned)

[innerdream]

Thanks Phillipe, good insight.

[Devin Johnston]

We just had a presentation from a vendor yesterday that used a series of 360 VR's edited together into a video. It was very cool, the experience was created to show off their product, instead of flying clients to the site they used this to give a tour. It was all real video shot by a drone and a stationary 3d camera and I decided to run a test to see if I could reproduce it using Vray. My render times are 10 hours per frame at a resolution of 5000x2813, it's complementary impractical for any project. The VR hardware is also cumbersome and kind of gross, who wants to put a headset on that 100's of people have worn, I don't even like touching other peoples keyboards. I think these 360 VR are most practice when shown on a screen using something like Youtube's 360 video player but render times are a big road block.

[innerdream]

That's why people are using Unreal Engine and others to remove the render time burden. Anyhow, there's other problems as you mentioned and also quality issues also mentioned.

[philippelamoureux]

I realised that I didn't really answered your original question Robert. Doing VR is extremely easy but you have to make some tradeoff with the quality. Ue4 comes with fully ready vr templates now, with teleporters for vive controllers, etc. It's really not harder than doing a normal playable scene. I've said it before I think you could theorically make a vr product without even having a vr headset. The templates are very well done. As long as you know what your are doing, it would be possible imo.

 

But...

 

Glass reflections... forget about it

Forest environment... very tough, maybe 100% baked...but then you need like 64gb of ram and xeons otherwise you'll end up with huuuuge build time.

dynamic lighting/shadow... forget about it

Supersampling in post process volume, to have super clean images... forget about it

 

Take your scene, if you can't even reach 90 fps (without vr) then forget vr.

 

In any empty scene, I usually have 120 fps, but when adding eye candy it's very easy to end up with something running at 30 ish fps. Now vr would need to run this twice. Impossible again.

Edited October 14, 2016 by philippelamoureux

[innerdream]

Thanks for the good info. So, 90 fps is the minimum then for a good experience? What are we talking about in terms of hardware to do a nice interior scene with good textures/eye candy? I would like to know so when someone says I want that, the video they saw on YouTube, I can tell them they're nuts! LOL

[philippelamoureux]

I have a gtx 980, Rafael Reis (ue4arch) a 980ti or even better iirc and still we can't really have glass reflections (planar reflection actor). He also had to turn off the gorgeous parallax occlusion mapping on certain materials so VR could work! I think Rafael also had to remove the 3d grass. He used a simple texture for vr. Kind of optimization you have to do right now, even on relatively good gpus like our 980s.

 

Our scenes had vegetation tho. If your can get away with that it's a huge plus!

[innerdream]

I have a gtx 980, Rafael Reis (ue4arch) a 980ti or even better iirc and still we can't really have glass reflections (planar reflection actor). He also had to turn off the gorgeous parallax occlusion mapping on certain materials so VR could work! I think Rafael also had to remove the 3d grass. He used a simple texture for vr. Kind of optimization you have to do right now, even on relatively good gpus like our 980s.

 

Our scenes had vegetation tho. If your can get away with that it's a huge plus!

 

Good to know thanks! IMO VR is most suited to interiors as they are the hardest for clients to visualize from plans and still renderings. VR for exteriors would be more of a luxury item to me.

[philippelamoureux]

At this point tho you might prefer to do something like this : https://corona-renderer.com/forum/index.php/topic,13467.0.html

 

It's easy to show to a client, it's ''easier'' to produce in theory, if you know a little about corona! Corona 1.5 now has some post production stuff included by default. Gloom, glare, etc. You can practically skip photoshop post-prod in many cases.

[innerdream]

Looks good! What software do they use to stitch and display the image?

[philippelamoureux]

Krpano

[Francisco Penaloza]

Thanks for the good info. So, 90 fps is the minimum then for a good experience? What are we talking about in terms of hardware to do a nice interior scene with good textures/eye candy? I would like to know so when someone says I want that, the video they saw on YouTube, I can tell them they're nuts! LOL

 

It depend of the hardware you are presenting, for Oculus and HTC for larger projects you''ll need the best of the best

Here we tried a "Typical project" high School building with furniture, two stories, minimum landscaping (Some trees) and we used Prospect (from IRIS VR) so the visual quality is not much refined, no glossy or glowing effects.

That sucker run only in our Xeon @3.6 with 64 RAM with an GTX 1080 FE. Wel aso have BOX i7 @ 4Ghz with the 1080. Also work fine.

I think when faster the CPU the better. Also video card very important.

 

We tested first with a Dell Laptop (VR ready) it had a i7 at 2.5 with 32 RAM with a GTX 980. But in laptops the GTX is shrink down version of the desktop version. In that case the laptop could not reach the 90 FPS so the image was jittering and make everybody sick.

 

Some vendors said you could get a long with 70 FPS but still it make you sick IMO, so 90 FPS is the sweet spot.

Later I developed an Stingray version of the same project and it run a little better on the Laptop but still not totally jitters.

To develop the Stingray version I used the same Xeon but with a Quadro M4000, performance on the screen was fine, no hiccups but with the Oculus or HTC there was jittering.

Cooking time on Stingray was pretty long, besides there is no way to know how long it will take so, I lef it over night, was done the next morning.

[philippelamoureux]

If you bake everything you should be able to have a good looking experience. But the minute you have dynamic/movable stuff, prepare to see the framerate drop, and fast.

 

I'm not a huge fan of one-click solutions that usually look very rough, like iris VR. But that's me.

[innerdream]

It depend of the hardware you are presenting, for Oculus and HTC for larger projects you''ll need the best of the best

Here we tried a "Typical project" high School building with furniture, two stories, minimum landscaping (Some trees) and we used Prospect (from IRIS VR) so the visual quality is not much refined, no glossy or glowing effects.

That sucker run only in our Xeon @3.6 with 64 RAM with an GTX 1080 FE. Wel aso have BOX i7 @ 4Ghz with the 1080. Also work fine.

I think when faster the CPU the better. Also video card very important.

 

We tested first with a Dell Laptop (VR ready) it had a i7 at 2.5 with 32 RAM with a GTX 980. But in laptops the GTX is shrink down version of the desktop version. In that case the laptop could not reach the 90 FPS so the image was jittering and make everybody sick.

 

Some vendors said you could get a long with 70 FPS but still it make you sick IMO, so 90 FPS is the sweet spot.

Later I developed an Stingray version of the same project and it run a little better on the Laptop but still not totally jitters.

To develop the Stingray version I used the same Xeon but with a Quadro M4000, performance on the screen was fine, no hiccups but with the Oculus or HTC there was jittering.

Cooking time on Stingray was pretty long, besides there is no way to know how long it will take so, I lef it over night, was done the next morning.

 

That's the thing, I see requests for "VR" all the time but the client has no idea what it takes to have a good experience!

[Francisco Penaloza]

Well, the thing is "VR" now means a lot of stuff. There is a flow of information that confuses the people, all of us,

Within VR you have still 360 images, 360 videos, simple Open GL output (or whatever they use) such Kubity, or more refined but not really such Twin motion, and many others, then you have full real time 3D Such Unreal, Stingray, Unity and others.

So when a client said VR, your first question should be, like what. Pretty sure they seen something some where and that's what they like.

Then is when we need to talk them and look for the right solution depending of time and budget.

To Us as artist, Unreal is the favorite solution, because we know the possibilities and how it looks. But in reality, not every client need that. some of them just want a quick turn around to review design and space. We should not overlook that, it is very valuable for some people, as a comparison that's the power of Sketchup. If you compared with Maya or 3D Max, it is a shitty 3d modeling software, but in it simplicity is so powerful that almost all design firm uses some way or other.

If you are a freelancer, yes doing thing like Kubity or Prospect Vr won't be the most souls feeder project, and it may not be even worth it financially.

But something in between that, and Unreal may be the sweet spot.

 

Really define what you can do and tell a client, yes VR is cool but it is pricey and time demanding.

[innerdream]

Very good points, thank you!

[beestee]

There are what I consider 3 types of VR for architectural visualization, in order of most immersive to least:

 

1. Realtime VR

2. Lightfield VR

3. Static VR

 

Realtime VR is anything that allows you to render a stereoscopic pair on-demand from any vantage point desired.

 

Lightfield VR is multiple stereoscopic pairs pre-rendered from one pre-determined location blended to simulate parallax occlusion.

 

Static VR is one stereoscopic pair pre-rendered from one pre-determined location.

 

There are hybrids of Lightfield VR and Static VR that add motion on a pre-determined path, or hotspot jumping to other pre-determined locations which supplement and extend their usefulness.

 

 

 

I just had a look at qrVR by kubity. I really like the idea behind it, but the "VR" mode, at least on the mobile apps, is not stereoscopic. Everything else about it is pretty great though, and I imagine with some more development time they will get stereoscopic implemented.

 

Looks like they plan to add Oculus Rift support this month, so maybe they are implementing stereoscopic rendering with that.

 

Non-stereoscopic VR to me seems not worth the effort.

[innerdream]

Non-stereoscopic VR to me seems not worth the effort.

 

I'm new to the terms what is the difference? I'm new to all of it really.

[beestee]

It is essentially a flat panoramic image.

 

In a true stereoscopic rendering, the view for each eye will be slightly different, as in reality.

[innerdream]

I guess I need to try the different types out to fully get the difference.