Rendering 360° 3D videos.

[coolperez8]

So, I've seen a tutorial on YouTube which shows how to render 360° videos in Source Filmmaker using a method with cubemapping along with Blender, I tried it but I used the "Export Stereoscopic" option and used the cubemap project provided for both the left and right frames to export both the left and right eye images. When this was done I noticed seams in the exported video. So, what I was wondering is if there's a proper method in order to export 360° VR (3D) videos from SFM. How can I do this?

[Zappy]

Pre-rendered videos can't do 360-degree stuff and stereoscopicness at the same time very well.

If you face forwards with a VR headset on, your left eye is to the west of your right eye. This means that the left and right eye viewpoints for the pre-rendered video should be to the left and right of each other. This makes sense.
But if you face to the left, your left eye is to the south of your right eye, meaning that for this orientation, the left and right eye viewpoints should be next to each other, but on a different axis than above.
And if you face backwards, your left eye is to the east of your right eye, requiring the two viewpoints to be completely swapped from when facing forwards.
(YouTube's help desk(?) used to have an example image demonstrating this problem very clearly, but I can't seem to find it now.)

So, basically, you would have to render every single column (every single vertical line of pixels) with a slightly different viewpoint, being slightly rotated around and such. In Source Filmmaker, this can't be done automatically, requiring you to manually set up a new camera position and angle and do a new export for every single column in the video. Even if you went through the trouble of doing that, the end result would probably be at least slightly nauseating in virtual reality, due to, again, every single column being from a slightly different viewpoint/perspective.

And even then, that's all ignoring the fact that you can tilt your head to the side, causing your eyes to be less horizontally distanced and more vertically distanced. (Not to mention that if it's pre-rendered, it'd only cater to a single specific distance between each eye centre.)


TL;DR: 360-degree stereoscopicness, especially for virtual reality, requires certain things that pre-rendered videos can't deliver.