Before I started working on Orbital Loop, we had some R&D time in the studio. I was interested in creating some scenes in VR that could potentially run on a mobile device but look like a scene that would run on a higher end PC. Because Mobile VR is so demanding on low draw calls this meant I couldn't stick a scene with a bunch of objects, light it and have it run. So instead I turned to render targets, lots of them. I used 9 render targets, 4 per eye to give a 360 field of view, the 1 to composite them into a final video.

In the first video, I used a prototype game that we were working on and stuck the camera rig in a scene and animated its movement on a path. If you are viewing this in a web browser you should be able to rotate around by click and dragging within the video, if you are on a VR headset everything should be in stereoscopic 3d


In this example I wanted to prototype time of day. For this method the time of day was done by hacking together 4 different skydomes and 4 different reflection captures. I stitched them together using blueprint and animated them in matinee. This allowed me to have a faked dynamically lit environment without the perf overhead of dynamic lighting.