Andrew Hazelden wrote the Dome master lens shader for Mental Ray to use in Maya, 3DSmax and Softimage. The positive is its free and it even does stereo 360 in a latlong format too. The negative is its obviously not "viewport" real time, but at least it doesn't require tedious stitching!
http://www.andrewhazelden.com/blog/2012/06/domemaster3d-lens-shader-for-softimage/ However, he recently released a panoramic VR playblast for Maya at $249, so maybe persuaded to do a softimage version if you have the funds. http://www.andrewhazelden.com/blog/downloads/playblastvr-for-maya/ Cheers On Fri, Oct 9, 2015 at 10:07 PM, Matt Lind <speye...@hotmail.com> wrote: > You can write a shader for use in the realtime viewport, or custom display > host. Between the two graphics library choices, I would go with OpenGL > because DirectX inside of Softimage is quite flakey/buggy and only supports > DirectX 9, possibly 10. > > OpenGL shader performance inside of the Softimage realtime viewport is not > efficient. There is as much as 20% overhead just for querying the scene to > determine what needs to be shaded even before shading computations begin. > That's another way of saying don't expect grandiose interactive performance > on moderately complex scenes. If the scene gets complicated enough, you'll > get better performance with mental ray, which can most definitely do the > panoramic thingy. > > The custom display host is a different ballgame as it's more of standalone > app plugged into the Softimage UI with minimal communication pipeline > between your app and Softimage. You can get excellent performance writing > OpenGL shaders here, but you'll have little interaction with the scene due > to the lack of information Softimage feeds to the custom display host. > You'll get basic keyboard and mouse feedback, camera movements, plus high > level commands executed by the user, but if you need to know what happens > in the construction history of a given object or need to drill down to get > more details, you'll be largely blocked and have to figure out your own > hack to do those things. > > > Matt > > > > > > > > Date: Fri, 9 Oct 2015 18:29:37 +0100 > From: Nuno Conceicao <nunoalexconcei...@gmail.com> > Subject: Re: Softimage Panoramic OpenGL viewer (does it exist?) > To: No name <softimage@listproc.autodesk.com> > > > Hi again, never got any reply about this subject and was wondering if > anyone on the list knows assuming I get someone with some good coding > experience if its possible to actually write a plugin/viewport shader or > whatnot in order to enable the possibility of doing panoramic (up to 360 > degree) realtime previews. > Also what would be the actual way of doing this, is it possible through the > Opengl or Direct3D viewport by using some kind of hack of writing a buffer > into a quad in camera space (post effect) or by creating an actual viewport > plugin? > Any documentations/tips on how to sort this? > > Maybe Raph, if you are still around in the list could you share some > thoughts please? > > The reason is that we are doing some projects that involves panoramic > renders and its a pain in the arse/ time consuming process to use camera > rigs to capture a panorama and then stitching all this together in one > seamless video which only gives an approximation to what the exact result > should be. > Cheers > > Nuno > > -- Max Crow Creative Supervisor NSC Creative National Space Centre, Exploration Drive, Leicester, LE4 5NS, UK http://www.NSCcreative.com <http://www.nsccreative.com/>
