All Mode“So I hope you’ll enjoy it as much as I hated rendering it!” – Mets
The above quote is from the description of one of Mets videos. He further says that it took 47 hours (141 hours total CPU time) to render that video of 2B grinding a dick into that fat ass. He was using a render farm and I’m assuming he had to pay for those hours. As an example, the Blender Street farm has 32 thread servers at $3 per hour usage. I believe that works out to ~$12 for 141 hours of active CPU time. That is $12 to render out maybe 3-4 seconds of 2B’s boner bouncing bum. It is then looped longer in post.
I only needed the 3 seconds to finish up but I guess some folks can marathon their junk.
With that time and those costs who can be surprised that we have yet to see a CGI VR porn scene at a full 15-30 minutes. A romantic comedy about Widow and Tracer would make a great series! The hellish amount of time and cost to render a VR scene in Blender Cycles provides an obvious obstacle few can surpass. There is more to the annoyance in fact.
Blender 2.79 Cycles rendering a 720×720 image. Still not done after 2 minutes.
Blender 2.8 Eevee rendered the same view at 1920×1920 in 23 seconds.
The promise of Blender 2.8 and the Eevee render engine
Twist and tweak 2B in real-time
“Why is having real-time rendering at a quality level approaching Cycles (with caveats) a good thing beyond just the final render time?” – you ask
For the Professional …
- Time is Money – All of the actions from modeling to animation can be done while viewing the scene fully rendered in the viewport. The artist has to exercise less of their imagination and memory. Hours of work can be ruined with an “amateur mistake”.
- Time is Money – High-quality sample renders are quick to make and share with the client. There is less time back
This is not what 2B looks like!
and forth with the client. The client can get the results faster thus cheaper. The first full quality “final render” in Cycles is more likely to be the only “final render” needed.
For the Amateur …
- Experimentation is risky and mistakes are costly – A newbie like me might not notice a screw up until after minutes or hours in a high-quality render. A plain view is not showing all the layers of complexity with the materials and lighting. The noise and faults of a quick render might hide something worse.
- Taking up the hobby is expensive– It takes a beefy machine to render out cycles or you spend money for time on a public render farm. Prohibitively so when making VR content. Imagine if Mets didn’t have access to a beefy computer or that render farm. How long then? I myself don’t have a machine powerful enough to render a 720×720 picture in Cycles reasonably. Let alone something for VR.
“I get it … it’s faster … faster is better … now, what’s the catch?”
The VR camera doesn’t work in Blender Eevee!
SAY WHAT!!?!?!
Yep. I mean nope. The equirectangular camera works fine in Blender 2.8 but only in the Cycles render engine. The reason it doesn’t work is in the fundamentals of how the camera plugs into Cycles. The Blender team is small and they don’t consider it a priority to hack a new VR camera into Eevee.
It’s not beyond me to screw with people and write a blog that sucks at the end. But … my friends … not this time!
I don’t know if they were the first to figure it out but someone smart at Unitedfilmdom Ltd shared how they do 360 degree VR with Eevee. They kindly shared the two .blend files.
The secret is to use six cameras with 90-degree field of view in a cube. Thus creating a cube map. Now that I know the trick it’s dang obvious. Cubemaps are just another way to organize a panoramic image. You can convert from one to the other with known techniques and existing software. Awesomely they showed how to do that cubemap to equirectangular conversion in Blender as well. The other software tools (I know about) specializing in stitching and converting panoramas are costly. So thanks again for that Unitedfildom Ltd!
Put that Champagne Down
The person who shared the technique appears to only ever need 360 degrees in 2D. And that won’t do. No sir. That won’t do at all. I take back those extra thanks.
You can’t put two 360 degree cameras side-by-side to create stereo VR like you can with 2 standard(ish) cameras to make flat screen 3D. Obviously, I wouldn’t be promising a tutorial if I didn’t figure out the small change necessary for true stereo VR. There are imperfections that show up but perfection isn’t free. If the scene is designed around them they will be visually imperceptible. NOW you can pull out the booze.
A tutorial for converting the 2D Widow scene into 3D VR180 is coming soon(ish)
My VR conversion (Click for YouTube VR)
I might actually be the first person to figure out the workflow to create VR 180/360 in 3D in Eevee. My first hacks were with the amazing tree creature Eevee demo’s .blend file. I hadn’t ever touched Blender 2.8 and haven’t touched Blender in years. So I had a hard enough time with the basics and didn’t spend much time on the overall bits like lighting before declaring victory and posting it on YT. So it’s not anywhere near as amazing as the 2D version. But as always … “you have to see it in VR!”
Apologies for posting anything SFW on this site but Rule34 is in effect right? So I’m sure sooner or later someone more creative and talented than me will also play with that .blend file. I’m guessing someone will slap on a big floppy creature pecker or maybe a deep branch bush. I’m just guessing. I’m not making a challenge for someone to do it. Nope.
Once I had that crotch lacking bug muncher under my belt I went after something bigger. Put on the big-boy pants and grabbed a .blend file from a master of the Rule34 arts. Could I do justice to a creation by The Mets of Blender once known as The Mets of SFM? I picked a scene he had not turned into VR himself.
In the tutorial, we will walk through how I lazily lovingly butchered converted the “Widow Reverse Prone” scene into 3D VR 180.
Until then you can enjoy the finished render of “Widow In The Spotlight”
I lack the talent to animate my own scenes so it’s awesome that Mets lets his Patrons play with his existing ones to learn and put their own spin on it. If anyone knows anyone else kind enough to share .blend files please leave a note in the comments. I’m no master craftsman like Dark Dreams. No promises I’ll convert it. But I’d love to look see to learn more of what’s possible and what’s not.
This blog was technical. As per my promise, the next blog will involve some content and artistry.
I can be a bit long and thick in my writing so an extra special thanks for your time and trying to take it all in.
–Simian
Many thanks to Mets for sharing his blend files. See Met’s Patreon for details (click image)