Tutorials at Lizard Lounge Graphics : QTVR Projects

Apple's QuickTime VR (QTVR) is a super way to create virtual environments and objects that do not require much in the way of processing overhead to view and interact with. You can also use Apple's QTVR Authoring Studio to link Panorama scene files and Object movies through the use of hot spots. QTVR Object movies can be set up so that each individual position can have an animated loop sequence associated with it. Of course this means that you will need to render or produce all those extra frames and that the finished movie size will also be a bit larger.

Cinema 4D XL has been able to write out to QTVR Panorama and Object movie files for quite some time now (since version 5.0). With Object movies in particular you are really somewhat limited in defining where the center of your movie is going to be as C4D XL automatically places it at the world origin. There are times when you might want to center the camera on a particular region in your scene to produce a QTVR Object movie. And there is another thing - Net rendering with C4D NET does not support the QTVR format at all.

If you want to take advantage of a C4D NET rendering farm, or desire to place the origin of your QTVR Object movie somewhere other than at the world origin then you need to roll your own solution. To save you the trouble of doing it, I have produced a simple project file that you can use to create your own C4D XL QTVR Object movies.

The project file is set up so that you can move the entire array of camera, and camera control objects to any point in your scene. I've set my camera to have a square aspect ratio - you can change this if you want.

A note of caution - you will need to have some sort of QTVR authoring tools to work with the resulting QuickTime movie files. There are some FREE QuickTime VR tools that you can download from Apple's web site - so make sure that you have everything you need to work with your QTVR movie files. If you already own the QTVR Authoring Studio (v1.0.1) then you have most everything you will need. There are still some fun things to check out though. However - most of the tools are Mac only.

Later on I'll take a look at some new things like the Cubic QTVR scene and panorama files.