Hey guys,

I’ve been acting as a consultant on a 3d project for a while at the SAT (Society for technological art) in Montréal. Basicly trying to figure out a nice workflow for creating content in blender and projecting it in a horizontal dome that sits ‘above’ the spectator.  The guys at the SAT wanted a workflow both for offline rendering and realtime rendering.  Realtime rendering ain’t much of a problem since there is a few way you can do it easely (althought they aren’t really optimized) like cube mapping (renders 5 images and stitch them together as a circle to be projected in the dome). Realtime was another problem because there was no clear way (for me at least) to render 5 images, stitch them, and send them to the projector all that at a rate of at least 25 frames per second.

So I prayed, and a blender god descended from the elysiun field. His name is Dalai Felinto.  The SAT gave me the ‘All go’ signal to ‘hire’ someone to code something for the game engine, and Dalai, for his previous work in the game engine, was the perfect guy for the job.  Indeed he was. He started coding at the end of december, and now it’s basicly done.  And it works damn well! With this project, he saved alot of time and money to the guys at the SAT. To thank him, well they paid him, and then they paid him a trip to Montreal for three days and test the dome first hand! I was invited for the occasion aswell as Martin “theeth” Poirier, so we could discuss the possibilities of the dome, aswell as the possible problems that could occur in their upcoming projects (an animated short movie for the dome. Yep, that’s a 360 degrees CGI environment in 2x HD resolution)

Here,s a video Dalai filmed during a test in the dome showcasing Yo Frankie! with the hemispheric realtime camera

YoFrankie in a Dome – BGE crazy tests from Dalai Felinto on Vimeo.

Have a nice day!

Jean-Sébastien Guillemette.