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Teaser Tuesday - Rendered Panoramas - Vectorworks 2018


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@JimWI notice what looks like a VR ocon in the bottom right, it flicks to full screen, will this be for the vr?? You mentioned this works well with Gear VR, is there one that would be more compatible with VW? Vive or Oculus?? Can I get a VR view if i use Gear VR to view this panorama??

Thanks

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  • Vectorworks, Inc Employee
38 minutes ago, Alan Woodwell said:

@JimWI notice what looks like a VR ocon in the bottom right, it flicks to full screen, will this be for the vr?? You mentioned this works well with Gear VR, is there one that would be more compatible with VW? Vive or Oculus?? Can I get a VR view if i use Gear VR to view this panorama??

Thanks

 

Gear VR is the one I have the most experience with, but I'll grab the Rift and/or Vive this week and give it a shot. It uses a web interface fromthe cloud, but a raw jpeg locally, so I suspect compatibility won't be an issue.

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  • Vectorworks, Inc Employee
13 hours ago, bcd said:

Am I the only one who finds the perspectives troubling? Shouldn't they match real world perspectives much better than this?

 


Not sure, but it seemed to match the 360 pano photography I loaded into viewers as well. When viewing a pano the elements further from center will become distorted unless you look right at them, I think at the level shown above its showing more than the human eye could focus on at once, usually the field of view would be more restricted. 

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12 minutes ago, line-weight said:

Might be nice to have a narrow/wide field of view option in the viewer. That wide angle does distort things at the edges quite a lot.


For now the web one doesn't, but it'll support that in any viewer you pop the image into. It'll also depend on the viewers screen resolution and aspect ratio to some extent, but till never match architectural perspective rules since it isn't flat.

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1 hour ago, JimW said:

I think at the level shown above its showing more than the human eye could focus on at once, usually the field of view would be more restricted. 

Not so sure about this - the human eye including mid peripheral https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peripheral_vision sees up to 120º. With my screen size, distance & resolution I'm seeing probably  only 40º-50º in full screen and naturally I will pan left and right when exploring the scene rather than moving it and keeping my gaze fixed to the center.

In my view everything we see should be credible and not require the viewer to subconsciously warp the representation or unnaturally restrict viewing to the center of the scene  or move the image to maintain the illusion.

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In my view everything we see should be credible and not require the viewer to subconsciously warp the representation or unnaturally restrict viewing to the center of the scene  or move the image to maintain the illusion.


We didn't make any design decisions on our own related to this, just went with the standards for 360 panos. 

 

Let me think about this a litttle - I have a feeling that this is a mathematically incorrect pov. (forgive the pun!)


If there ends up being other view options else you'd added to the cloud viewer, feel free to wishlist it now, no need to wait for release. Marissa was messing with an app that let you view panos differently, but I didn't see much practical difference between the other modes. If I missed something important, let me know!

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  • Marionette Maven
13 minutes ago, JimW said:

Marissa was messing with an app that let you view panos differently, but I didn't see much practical difference between the other modes. If I missed something important, let me know!

 

Here are two different viewing modes using Ricoh Theta's app, which I use to share my 360 photos that I take... The first mode (Straight) is similar to how we display things, and the second mode (Mirror Ball) will round the outer edges of your current view to prevent some of the stretching you see with Straight.

 

EDIT:

Neither view will give a perfect representation of what you would see in real life, the mirror ball helps a little because it sort of emulates a fish-eye view which may feel more normal for someone to see.

 

 

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1 minute ago, bcd said:

would yah slow down - I'm getting dizzy :)

Not sure of the difference but I much prefer the ceiling light in the 2nd version.

 

I also prefer the second version :)

The plus side of all of this is since you get that jpeg file, you can use whatever viewer you like, my example was as simple as importing it into a different viewer. 

I'm still 100% a fan of the feature overall. I really like that I don't have to do any extra work to share my pano-view after exporting it with Vectorworks, it's just nice to know there are other options.

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20 minutes ago, JimW said:

We didn't make any design decisions on our own related to this, just went with the standards for 360 panos. 

I believe this is a vital part of the discussion & the offering. Perhaps as mentioned above how to customize the crop, whether mirrorball is implemented or even the underlying 3d-2d mapping. It would be a pity to release this without considering the best mapping matrices available. Chances are the pano standards were developed several years ago?

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4 minutes ago, bcd said:

I believe this is a vital part of the discussion & the offering. Perhaps as mentioned above how to customize the crop, whether mirrorball is implemented or even the underlying 3d-2d mapping. It would be a pity to release this without considering the best mapping matrices available. Chances are the pano standards were developed several years ago?

 

This may be a limitation at the moment. I have yet to see any other (simplified enough for ease-of-use) web viewer capable of what Theta does. I've been through many different options to find the best way to share my 360 images, and all of them perform how we do with Vectorworks.

I don't think these limitations are due to our lack of research into the topic.

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1 minute ago, bcd said:

I believe this is a vital part of the discussion & the offering. Perhaps as mentioned above how to customize the crop, whether mirrorball is implemented or even the underlying 3d-2d mapping. It would be a pity to release this without considering the best mapping matrices available. Chances are the pano standards were developed several years ago?


Right, sorry I didn't mean it didn't matter, just that it isn't part of the export process or render itself. That distortion is controlled completely by the viewer you place the image in, so the wishlist item would just be for the cloud storage web view to include different projection options. 

It's still a perfectly valid wish, but it affects the viewer, not the export part. Apologies for that, I let my brain get more compartmentalized around this time of year than I should.

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3 minutes ago, JimW said:

It's still a perfectly valid wish, but it affects the viewer, not the export part.

Perhaps the misunderstanding is mine - I see this feature being used on-screen as much as within a VR headset? eg are you currently previewing the results on-screen or in a headset?

Will a client utilize a headset every time a design is delivered or just preview it on-screen? I have a sense that if it's delivered to the computer it will be passed only intermittently to the headset.

Could I be completely missing the point here? Or are there perhaps dual uses for this - if so it seems like there are 2 export options needed - screen & device?

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2 minutes ago, bcd said:

Perhaps the misunderstanding is mine - I see this feature being used on-screen as much as within a VR headset? eg are you currently previewing the results on-screen or in a headset?

Will a client utilize a headset every time a design is delivered or just preview it on-screen? I have a sense that if it's delivered to the computer it will be passed only intermittently to the headset.

Could I be completely missing the point here? Or are there perhaps dual uses for this - if so it seems like there are 2 export options needed - screen & device?

 

The new functionality in Vectorworks is the ability to export a 360 panoramic image, that's the only part that is new as far as Vectorworks itself as an application is concerned.

For viewing it falls into the realm of the Cloud Services website, depending how users choose to share their images after export. Again, in open discussion like this, thinking of the two things as a combined user experience as you did is perfectly fine, I just had them separate in my head since i'm still in a limbo period where there are some features I can talk about and some that I can not, but that was a failing on my part. 

 

My immediate thinking is that the most common use will be the Cloud Services shareable link, since it requires the least steps for the user to get a visible model to their clients or coworkers by simply pasting that link into a chat or email that anyone can view. If that turns out to be true (we will be tracking this in the background to confirm) which I expect it will, then we for sure will want to invest more resources in adding visual control options to our web based 360 viewer. However for a 1.0 release of this tool, I was comfortable with us limiting the feature set to giving users a quick share option, but also giving them access to the raw image itself so that they can host it on a service or in a local app that already offers the view options they need.

In the future, in addition to view distortion/projection controls, I would want other immersion/convenience items such as being able to click an icon to move to another prerendered 360 view or even a chain of them going from room to room or place to place in a model. The next step after that might be what is being discussed here, where a fully rendered environment that the user can move in actively and look at any object from any angle, but I see that as a ways off still:
 

 

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27 minutes ago, JimW said:

My immediate thinking is that the most common use will be the Cloud Services shareable link, since it requires the least steps for the user to get a visible model to their clients or coworkers by simply pasting that link into a chat or email that anyone can view. If that turns out to be true (we will be tracking this in the background to confirm) which I expect it will, then we for sure will want to invest more resources in adding visual control options to our web based 360 viewer. However for a 1.0 release of this tool, I was comfortable with us limiting the feature set to giving users a quick share option, but also giving them access to the raw image itself so that they can host it on a service or in a local app that already offers the view options they need.

I bet the most used method in the beginning will be in the web browser on a phone or mobile device which is essentially the middle ground between a full on headset and a desktop monitor. I first saw this thread on my phone and clicking on the images resulted in a great first experience. I could turn in place and look at the full panorama or I could swipe to spin the view. Simple and interactive. Viewing this way also minimizes how noticeable the distortion is. I can actually imagine the first enhancement I'd like is a way to click on items in the panorama and get more information (eg. notes or a database record).

Kevin

 

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7 minutes ago, Kevin McAllister said:

I can actually imagine the first enhancement I'd like is a way to click on items in the panorama and get more information (eg. notes or a database record).


That would be many phases off I suspect, since you can't embed such things into a JPEG. I would peg that technologically as after the ability to export an entire model out as a baken prerendered scene in something like Unity or Unreal, then we'd have to add a system of transferring the record values and other data from objects as intractable points, unless we limited to JUST OpenGL and forced users into WebView (separate tech from this) which I wouldn't want to do.

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6 minutes ago, JimW said:


That would be many phases off I suspect, since you can't embed such things into a JPEG. I would peg that technologically as after the ability to export an entire model out as a baken prerendered scene in something like Unity or Unreal, then we'd have to add a system of transferring the record values and other data from objects as intractable points, unless we limited to JUST OpenGL and forced users into WebView (separate tech from this) which I wouldn't want to do.

 

After seeing digitalcarbon's posts with labelled geometry within models I think the demand for this is already there. Have you tried an example with text? Maybe you could ask him for an example model to run through the beta version of Rendered Panoramas. I'd be curious what you'd get. I bet linking data and models win's the race :)

 

Kevin

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OH if you just had it in the model, then yeah as long as it appeared in Renderworks it would appear in the Pano. He uses OpenGL heavily however and leans on many things that are not "officially" supported at the moment though, so there are a lot of intermediate steps needed to bring this into the light.

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Just now, Kevin McAllister said:

 

After seeing digitalcarbon's posts with labelled geometry within models I think the demand for this is already there.

With you there Kevin, Perhaps in the interm while we're still utilizing jpg Data Visiblility could be mapped to into a second stacked panorama which become visible with proximity - I'm thinking of how the issue/problem of z-fighting could be harnessed to advantage.

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40 minutes ago, JimW said:

OH if you just had it in the model, then yeah as long as it appeared in Renderworks it would appear in the Pano. He uses OpenGL heavily however and leans on many things that are not "officially" supported at the moment though, so there are a lot of intermediate steps needed to bring this into the light.

Well in the model in the interim, but ultimately linked. This would be a useful direction for the VW Nomad app to go really - the ability to click on an object and find out about it. That's the jumping off point to the true usefulness of sharing the model.

KM

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7 minutes ago, twk said:

This is great. How long did it take to render the 360 Pano?


The kitchen one I think took about 5 hours on an 8 core i7 @ 3.1Ghz to render out an 8k image, however I have a lot of lights and a lot of indirect lighting stuff turned on so that could skew it. Fast Renderworks of this same view in 4K took about 45 mins i think.

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