How to create full spherical panorama 360 rendering with 3Ds Max and VRay?

Here I´ll enlighten how to create full spherical panorama renderings within 3Ds Max with VRay. You can make use of this technique to create panorama tours through design, animations in planetariums or skydomes for image based lighting. For QTVR, you would utilize the built-in panorama exporter from 3Ds Max, but for VRay, you would get dissimilar looking images for each side of the cube.

In order to accomplish 360 rendering domes or spheres, you should make use of the VRay camera method. The ultimate purpose of the 360 rendering is to may make a difference in setting up the camera and render parameters.

The following points demonstrate the differences:-

Dissimilar panorama formats

Let’s begin with a full sphere 360° panoramas. Reducing the size of this panorama is simple. The 3Ds Max has a fixed “Panorama Exporter” that is suited for trouble-free creation of QTVR. When you are utilizing VRay, you should employ the VRay Physical Camera setting the type to Spherical and 360° in the render settings camera. The image render resolution should be rolled out to an aspect ratio of 2.0. This is imperative with the purpose of getting non-distorted renderings with this camera setup.

What can you do with this equirectangular format? 

In fact, you need to change the image into a format that is readable as QTVR, as it utilizes a cube with 6 sides to display a panorama on the computer. You can create these 6 sides by converting the image with a software such as Cubic Converter. PanBox360 Flash Player is a good solution for prompt embedding of panoramas in websites.

Cylindrical and skydome panoramas

Here you necessitate cropping the rendered image bottom 50% - Skydome or top and bottom for the cylindrical panorama. Evidently, you don´t want to render full 360° x 180° images and then crop the images. You can crop the images while 360 rendering, simply by setting the render region parallel to your needs.

If you would like to render dome master images without converting the equirectangular image after rendering, VRay Dome Camera will efficiently serve the purpose. With the aid of this camera, you can effortlessly render skydomes or dome masters directly from within 3Ds Max.