Hey everyone,

We hope you are all having a great holiday time, aswell as a joyful new year’s eve!

There is a few thing I want to talk about today.  I’ve been working with one of our client recently. It’s a society in Montréal that strives to give space, money and equipment to artists who creates art related to technology. They call themselves the society for technological art (Société des arts technologiques).  We worked with them previously on the ‘Tomb Raider fashion show’ back in october/november.

Now two of their employees are starting to work on a project to devellop a tool they’ve been using for a few years but never to this extent.  They want to create a CGI short movie that is completly immersive. Immersive how you’ll ask? Simple, they want to create a completly CGI short movie that will be projected in a dome. Yep, a full 360 degrees horizontal (maybe even more..) and 180degrees vertical dome.  I’m sure most of you are aware of the difficulty (and quantity of work) such a short movie can bring.  But it’s an amazing challenge.  For now, I’ve only been working as a consultant on the 3d side of thing, and how Blender could be the solution to their logistic/money problems.

We’ve been doing a few rendering test, and we now have a pretty solid way of rendering a scene into a ‘half-sphere’ that can be projected into their dome.  We used a pretty similar technic to what the Planetarium of Weber state university are using (see Blendernation post here).  Meaning, having a camera looking directly at the top of a fully reflective sphere (which, obviously reflect the whole envrionnement).  I’ve done some modification to their setup since it caused some problems. As a matter of fact, their setup use an uv sphere which has a single vertex at the top (which create quite a few triangles).  Since we we will be rendering is very high-def (something along the lines of 2000×2000), I wanted the reflective sphere to be as ‘perfect’ as possible. Using subdivision surface, the triangle obviously didn’t deform well and were distorting the reflection, so I had to change the sphere to a full quad surface. Anyway, long story short, we now have a system that works.

But our client have bigger ambition. Bringing their immersive dome to the real-time realm is one of them.  They’d love to be able to setup a scene in the Blender Game Engine, insert an ‘hemispheric’ camera, press ‘p’ and play their game/archiviz/etc.  in their dome.  We’re currently working with Dalai Felinto to devellop a simple way to generate real-time environment map and use a script to render it out in the format we need for the dome.

This is a short term solution tho. For the long run, we would LOVE (note the emphasis here..) to have a true ‘camera’ object that ‘film’ the scene in an hemispheric kind of way.  I’ve prepared a .blend to show what I mean.  I definitly know nothing about coding work, and I’m sure this involve some pretty deep coding in Blender, but if anyone have any idea how this can be done. Make sure to drop me an email to jsguillemette [at] montagestudio.org

Here”s the .blend:  http://www.montagestudio.org/Ecks/SAT/360CameraDome_idea.blend

My client is of course willing to pay for the work that would be done.  So if you read this, and you’re a coder, and know how it can be done. Email me first, and we will listen to the budget you need to devellop such a tool.

Js.