Just found this one:
Render quality is nice. Navigation is not very convincing in my opinion.
Thank you for sharing!
Looking at the examples and documentation, it looks like the experience is based on 360 panoramas generated for example via Corona or V-Ray, but there is some mechanism that interpolates the panorama images while moving between different locations where panoramas were captured. When you navigate, you can see distortion in geometry, like for example duplicated chair legs, that are likely the result of this interpolation.
Yeah. Also the camera is forced to a specific direction when you click to a place you want to go to.
Can we count with a (even) better render quality in Shapespark someday?
To large extent it should be possible to match the quality of statically rendered 360 panorama with real time visualization.
The advantage of 360 panoramas that is hard to overcome is that you can use input geometry of any complexity and the download size and run-time performance stays the same, because only flat images are downloaded. With full real-time engine, like Shapespark, the geometry is downloaded and passed to GPU, so the geometry can’t be too huge. Panoramas can also use physically-correct ray-tracing for any effect, including reflections. Real-time engine can’t bake reflections, because reflections change when the camera moves, so they need to be generated in real time and are less accurate than ray-traced reflections.
Definitely ‘feels’ like a 360 solution rather than a real time solution. The navigation in a real time engine is why we are so taken by shapespark and with how it plugs in to our existing range of software makes it such a simple solution.
As we also create fully immersive VR using UE4, for us the whole 360 thing is an old approach which controls the end user and even if this solution does the hard work of pulling the 360’s into a single package, it is still limited to being a guided or controlled solution to some extent.
My guess would be that if the dev cycle of Shapespark continues at it’s current pace, anything limited to 360 pano will be blown out of the water.
All that said, they definitely cover off a lot of the opportunities this type of software provides, in their descriptive content that the guys at Shapespark would perhaps benefit from doing also.
I have no loyalty to any one software. Imo, it’s great to see more options out there to offer to clients. The real time aspect of Shapespark is fantastic, but half my clients don’t take advantage of it–they’d be just as happy with a product like Layama and if it requires less optimization that’s more time saved on my end. I welcome more web-based arch viz options.
Shapespark for the win! 