I had a pleasure to work on the annual Christmas greeting project for the OrangeLV studio. This year we wanted to create something for the Virtual Reality. We decided to make a 360 degree stereo VR animation where you can be apart of a small toy robot Christmas party.
My role was creating (modeling, texturing, rigging and animating) one of the robots (one with a xylophone), most of the props in the scene (including TVs, small tree, big chrismas lights, desk lamp etc.), rigging and simulations for the breaking light bulbs, procedural animation for the lights, rendering and final compositing.
One takeaway from the project was that at the time it seemed the world was not yet ready for pre-rendered VR animation. Video formats to support high resolution stereo 360 video in the web does not yet exist – as h264 supports only maximum 4096×2304 resolution which when split for two eyes is just barely acceptable. An on top of that – a lot of phones don’t even allow playing videos larger than 1080p. Even on computers, performance for such high resolution videos is terrible. Looks like we need to stick to real time VR content for a while. Of course this is just a matter of time until h265 becomes widely supported.
Regular 2D Version:
if you have a VR headset (cardboard or better) – you can enjoy the 360 degree stereo VR version:
Credits
Art team:
Gatis Kurzemnieks
Oskars Pavlovskis
Kaspars Šverns
Kristians Mednis
Music: Artūrs Liepiņš