Delhaize VR Visit
OneBonsai created a 3D rendered VR visit to showcase to the affiliates of the Delhaize Group.
The Challenge
OneBonsai was asked by Delhaize to create a Virtual Reality visit. This VR visit was shown to their affiliate store holders at their flagship event. To this end, we based ourselves on sketchup plans to build a 3D model of the scene.
We performed this project in a very short timeframe, and using novel techniques delivered both a flat screen 4K video as a 4K 360 fully 3D rendered video to be used in a Gear VR or Oculus Go device.
During the event, we handled the VR part and provided 30 devices to be used to show the Virtual Reality visit to as many visitors as possible. In the end, over 300 people were able to view the VR experience.
The Technical Talk
To meet the timeframe, OneBonsai used a combination of Cloud computing at Amazon Webservices and local computer power from RAVEN.
The first challenge was porting the entire sketchup file into a Real-Time Engine like Unreal Engine. This crucial part was done using the new Unreal Datasmith tool combined with manual retouching in 3DsMax. Using a team of 5 experts, OneBonsai was able to port an entire scene within 1 week.
To ensure a realistic look, we retouched almost all the materials in the scene. Unreal Engine is ideally suited to create realistic reflections, materials and lighting conditions.
Using Amazon Webservices, we employed a powerful cloud computer to perform the necessary light building (raytracing).
After lighting and materials optimisation, and ensuring that all assets were present in the scene, we moved to render the scene. To ensure a smooth video, we chose 60 frames per second (fps) and 4K video. However, given that we need a VR video, we have to render a full sphere each 1/60 second. This results in a huge number (>15.000 frames) for the entire video.
Sadly, cloud based rendering was impossible for the video we wanted to create. However, if we were to render this on our rig (Geforce 1080 Ti), it would still take over 8 days per full render. Clearly, this was unacceptable, as we would have to perform multiple renders to ensure we had a good result.
As such, together with RAVEN we created our own render farm with 32 powerful computers, each rendering part of the video, frame by frame. On average the rendering takes takes about 1 min per frame (1/60 second). The batches of frames were then stitched back together to form the full render. Given the large amount of computers at our disposal, we were able to render the entire scene in about 11 hours and were able to do 4 iterations to fix small issues.
The resulting video was ported to a format capable to run on the Oculus Go’s and Gear VR’s.
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