Object2VR script for 3dsMax

This article is out of date. Check out the script here. And a recent tutorial here.

Object2VR produces interactive 360 degree movies. The content for these movies can be photographic or 3d. The content consists of a spherical sequence of images. Creating the images within 3dsMax means you need to render your object from all angles. To make it easier to do this, I wrote this script. This is an instruction to create such frames. the package is being made with the program “object2VR” by gardengnome software.
I’ve written the script, but give no guarantees whatsoever. Keep in mind that Object2VR is not free software. I’m in no way linked to object2VR. I’ve only written this maxscript to ease the use of object2VR.

The result is an interactive flashmovie like this. Drag the mouse to turn the model.

VR sphere render script

The program object2VR uses columns and rows to describe the amount of images used for a single viewer. These can be compared to a globe. The columns are the meridians and the rows are parallels. The poles have to be at the top and at the bottom, otherwise object2VR doesn’t create a correct viewer. It’s a pain to create these rows and columns easily, so I’ve written a script to do it for you.  The script creates an animated camera along an imaginary sphere. You can specify the amount of columns and rows.To get an even distribution use: rows = (columns/2)+1 where columns is an even number. You can also specify a radius. That’s the distance of the camera to the origin. For small objects, use a small distance, for large objects use a large distance.
The script creates a standard camera and animates it. The script could be edited easily to create other types of cameras. Or you could link other cameras to the created standardcamera and leave the script alone.
When the frames have been rendered, you need to rename them so object2VR recognizes the columns and rows. Use the rename-section of the script. Pick the folder with the rendered images, specify the amount of columns and rows, test the settings (with the test-button) and then hit “Rename”.

Renaming

After renaming the renders you can load them in the object2VR program. Make sure you use the same renaming scheme in object2VR as in the script. By default the maxscript produces this pattern: ‘Row_’+ (rownumber) + ‘Column_’ + (columnnumber) + ‘.jpg’. But you can specify your own naming pattern in the script. Please make sure you use exactly two %-characters. Use the same pattern in object2VR. Remember when using 10 rows, object2VR expects row0-row9. The more images, the heavier the flash-movie will be. The example posted in this article is about 10MB.