Nozon and Chaos Group have announced a technology partnership that enables artists to create pre-rendered, volumetric virtual reality (VR) using PresenZ and V-Ray. Demonstrated for the first time at last week’s SIGGRAPH 2016, Anaheim, the technology allows for environments to be designed with free movement and full parallax without the help of a videogame engine.
The partnership between Nozon and Chaos Group will allow for 6 degree of freedom (6DOF) tracking in offline rendering while maintaining visual fidelity. Positional tracking is hugely important to VR – particularly in the avoidance of simulation sickness – and this new technology will bring the capability to deliver high quality content offline with fewer constraints on polycount and scene density.
“Animators, architects, designers – everyone has a need for immersive VR right now,” said Matthieu Labeau, Business Development Manager at Nozon. “Working with Chaos Group, we’ve been able to bring our technology to the entire V-Ray community, one of the largest user bases of 3D artists in the world. Now everyone has the same opportunity to apply volumetric VR to their 360° movies.”
According to Nozon, creating volumetric VR with PresenZ follows the traditional 3D workflow. Scenes are built in a 3D application and rendered directly in V-Ray. Now artists and designers have a pipeline that provides the simplest way to create high-quality VR with movement.
“When we saw what Nozon was doing with PresenZ, we knew this was something our users would love,” said Lon Grohs, Chief Commercial Officer at Chaos Group. “It’s going to be exciting to see where they push VR next.”
Presenz is already available to download via Steam, and the new V-Ray integration is likely to be added to this freely available build soon. VRFocus will keep you updated with all the latest details on PresenZ and future plans for the tool from Nozon.
