Blender 2.65a – complete fulldome render support
Hello all,
I’m pleased to announce that the latest version of Blender 3D is out. This is the collaborative effort of a team of developers, which I’m proudly a part of. The 2.65 edition is particularly relevant for the dome community due to a complete support for equidistant fisheye lens rendering.
Equidistant fisheye 180°, used for fulldomes. Image by Adriano Oliveira
That includes a series of fixes since last release, the most noticeable been the Equidistant Fisheye Lens fix, as I mentioned in an early post. This release not only benefit Fulldome artists, but also anyone willing to experiment with the Equisolid Fisheye lens. The image below is what you see from within the working viewport.
And how simple it is to use this? For those familiar with the builtin Cycles render engine this is as easy as it gets. For Equidistant fisheye lens all you need to do is to set the render dimensions to square (e.g., 1024 x 1024) and to set the field of view angle (usually 180°). For Equisolid fisheye lens you need to do is to set the lens size and one of the sensor dimensions. The other sensor dimension is taken from the render aspect ratio.
Equisolid fisheye, 3d viewport preview. Image by Pataz Studio – www.patazstudio.com
For the complete release information, please visit the official Blender 2.65 Release Log.
For the Fisheye Lens specific info, check:
Blender is under 60MB to download, free and more than capable to handle small to medium size productions. Go get it! I hope it can help more future fulldome productions in the future.
Enjoy it,
Dalai