Experiments with RenderMan and VR
Pre-Rendered Stereo Panorama
This is a test of Mach Kobayashi's Omnidirectional Stereo Projection Plugin for RenderMan RIS. The scene used was a procedurally shaded city street from a class demo. Please excuse the rough shading, I think there is only one shader being used in the scene whose properties are driven by primvars.
Baked for Unreal (6 DOF VR)
This is the same basic scene as the stereo panorama, but with materials and geometry baked out and tranferred to Unreal Engine. Turns out Unreal's default lighting looks better than my sorry attempt Maya/RIS! Unfortunately I found that I needed to half the resolution for 75 fps plackback on my mac laptop, but this demo shows that in principle it's possible to shade in RenderMan and bake out to Unreal for VR.
The process was to bake out diffuse, spec, and normals into textures and generate maya shaders from them. The later was implemented with the following script:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/s/kbz7eto3tm4rsdm/makeBakedMaterials.py?dl=0
The ugly part was prepping the meshes for unreal. That involved creating an extra uv set called "lightmap", triangulating the mesh, and exporting to fbx. I did that through a quick and dirty MEL script, which should only be considered a proof of concept, not a proper solution:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/s/j0q4o3o18r4dzkh/fixUVsAndExportForUnreal.mel?dl=0