What’s good about CV-VR Cam

Without any doubt, the most appealing quality of this plugin is how seamlessly it integrates into standard C4D workflow. In little-to-no-time at all, you can simply drop the 360° camera rig into your existing scene and be ready to render.

Many creatives spent years mastering the fine intricacies of Cinema’s shaders and lighting. Creative use of texture projections, optical tricks with fresnel gradients – from shiny balls to low-poly retro renders – all these techniques have become an arsenal of tricks for contemporary motion artists. For all people depending on their libraries of materials and textures, and for those who want to adapt existing content into 360 – CV-VR Cam is a great choice.

Personally, a few months ago I committed to using OTOY’s Octane Render. It had a moderately steep learning curve, as the shader logic differs from that of regular C4D, but after a while I got used to it. I made the decision around the same time I was planning my most recent PC build – and optimized it towards GPU acceleration. Because of that, Octane beat CV-VR Cam on my system, rendering similar scenes 2x – 4x faster.

If your render machine (or farm) is optimized towards CPU rendering, however, you should expect really good performance. Render times will be longer compared to what you are used to. The camera will now see all of the scene, not just a small section you framed. The frame sizes will also need to be significantly larger than classic 1080p (all test renders below were created at a moderate 4K mono – 4096x2048px). In my case, CV-VR Cam renders would add anywhere from 0-30% extra time when compared to rendering a traditional “flat” camera at the same pixel size.

If you aren’t incentivized enough yet – how about the price? CV-VR Cam is free to all current subscribers of Cineversity.com. In addition to the plugin itself, you will also find there a series of video tutorials on its use, as well as a pretty good primer on 360° rendering, publishing and practices – all hosted by Rick Barrett.