How to Render 360° Spherical Panoramas in VRay

Spherical Panoramas can be super helpful in showcasing any interior space, since they allow the viewer to explore the space for themselves. You don’t need to fuss over choosing limited camera angles to render. Instead, your spherical 360 shot will allow you to cover every view you might have wanted to render separately.

But rendering a 360 view isn’t the hard part, you also need to make it easy for everyone to explore. In this tutorial you’ll learn not just how to setup VRay for rendering such shots, but also on how to edit the picture metadata and integration with some fabulous free VR viewers. So let’s begin.

Camera Setup in VRay

1. Insert a VRay camera into the scene and place it in the centre of your scene.
2. Make sure the camera target and camera are at the same height and the view is level with the floor.
3. Open the Render Setup dialog and set the image dimensions to 6000×3000. You want the width to height ratio to always be 2:1 and a minimum of 6000 pixels wide for best results.
4. In the Camera rollout of the VRay Render Setup tab, set the type to Spherical with an override FOV of 360.
5. That’s it. Just setup any render elements for post processing work and hit the render button.
6. Because of the massive render dimensions, you might want to go easy on the details in the scene and the rendering samples.

Editing Metadata

In order to share this 360 spherical render on Facebook, you’ll need to change the metadata embedded with your picture. This is because Facebook relies on the metadata of a picture for identifying spherical panoramas taken with 360 cameras.

1. After saving your render on your hard drive, right-click the file and open its properties (For Windows systems).
2. Go to the Details panel, scroll down and enter the Camera make as RICOH and the model as RICOH THETA S. This is an actual panorama camera made by Ricoh.
3. You can also an online tool like Exifer to edit these details.
4. Now upload and post this spherical shot on Facebook and it should load it with its own panorama viewer.

Free VR Viewer Tools

If you’d like to post this spherical render on your website or send it to the client for viewing inside a browser, you can use the free Marzi PANO web tool. Just upload your render and it’ll create a downloadable HTML package containing all the files for online or offline viewing in a browser. You can also use the incredibly simple GoPRO VR Player for instant viewing on your PC.

I’ve linked the VR viewers used in this tutorial below:

1. MarziPANO: http://www.marzipano.net/
2. GoPRO VR Player: http://www.kolor.com/gopro-vr-player/download/

Enjoy and be sure to check out my full UE4 course and other free tutorials.