Volumetric Video — VR Playhouse
Volumetric Video — VR Playhouse
Volumetric video for virtual reality — built with Google Jump, Houdini, and Nuke at VR Playhouse. I love the visual aesthetic of point clouds and their ability to represent and recreate three-dimensional space. I used to bake out final gather points from Mental Ray, combining them to re-create a static visual cue of an entire animation sequence and using them as combined elements for lighting calculations. With Houdini, working with point clouds is just so much fun.
Point clouds are now everywhere — for storing values, geometric reconstruction, and volumetric video. The Google Jump Assembler delivers depth maps at 8K, which lets us bring more advanced film techniques into virtual reality production and begin building entirely new production workflows for 3D reconstruction and more immersive experiences.
Stereo VR is not "light-field" — stereo panoramas won't represent correct view-dependent light changes — but it allows for greater depth and parallax, and for better integration with computer-generated images. Rectifying shot stereo with CGI is very tricky and inherently has problems. In these examples I'm using the Foundry's NukeX, Cara VR, and Ocula on the front end, and Houdini from Side Effects on the back end.
The workflow included
Capture on the Google Jump rig — the starting point for a stereo VR pipeline where every frame will later be stitched, rectified, and reconstructed in depth.
The front end of the pipeline: stereo stitching in Cara VR with NukeX and Ocula, turning the Jump capture into stereo panoramas — and its 8K depth maps into point clouds.
Rectifying shot stereo against CGI is where the hard problems live; solving it here is what makes clean integration possible downstream.
"With Houdini, working with point clouds is just so much fun." —
The back end: Houdini rebuilding a location — Switzer Falls — as three-dimensional space from the Jump depth data.
This is 3D reconstruction toward volumetric video: greater depth, real parallax, and a path to more immersive experiences.
