Blender - IMAX Theater

[sn0wsh00]

Here's an IMAX theater I created in Blender:

Download link:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1VkKj0IXt6CKxCcEjm5F82diCPg5x7iCX/view?usp=drive_link

Features:

• 26.0 m x 19.8 m screen. Can be flat or curved.
• 8 rows of stadium seating
• 3 seat variations: low, medium and high poly
• 12 sets of speakers
• Blender drivers

How to use:

• All speakers are linked to either the Speaker_main or speaker_secondary data blocks. Speaker_main is used by the front and corner speakers, while speaker_secondary is used by the side and ceiling speakers. You only need to edit two speakers (one from each data block) to properly play imported sound
• Movies are controlled by the Movie_Texture node group inside the Movie_Screen material shader. The Movie_Screen shader can be accessed by selecting a screen mesh. Videos with 1.43 aspect ratios work best with this node. In Cycles, images are projected onto the screen via a spotlight. In EEVEE, the image is displayed directly on the screen, as light projection is not possible in EEVEE.

I created this Blender file to simulate how it's like to watch videos on a large format IMAX screen. Creating something like this inside a video game engine would certainly be better, but unfortunately, I currently have no idea how to use Unity, Unreal, Source 2 etc. A 360° video could also work as a VR environment, but Blender only renders panoramas natively in Cycles. 

You can find more information and full sized renders on these pages:

https://www.deviantart.com/sn0wsh00/art/Blender-IMAX-Theater-v2-1271329126

https://www.deviantart.com/sn0wsh00/art/Blender-IMAX-Theater-360-Panorama-v2-1272315468

[sn0wsh00]

Using EternalTrail's eeVR Blender plugin, I've finally been able to render my IMAX theater as a 360° video in EEVEE. It still took a while a render, but it was still a lot faster than Cycles:

DaVinci Resolve cannot export videos wider than 3840 pixels, so instead I used FFmpeg to create the video. Here's the FFmpeg code I used:

Spoiler

@echo off
ffmpeg -framerate 30 -i render/frame%%06d.png -i ds3.mp3 -pix_fmt yuv420p -c:v libx264 -crf 3 -preset slower -maxrate 50M -bufsize 100M -profile:v high -c:a aac -ar 48000 -b:a 384k -movflags +faststart output.mp4
pause

I tried encoding with libx265, but that caused issues on Youtube.

Watching a video projected onto a giant screen in VR/first person is very different from watching the video directly. For one, it makes it more obvious when the video's subject is off-centered. IMAX movies, despite their 1.43 aspect ratio, usually frame their subjects in a widescreen AR such as Scope; all the stuff outside the 2.39 aspect ratio frame is merely meant to fill the viewer's peripheral vision. For VR video, though, Iudex Gundyr is mainly positioned towards the top of the frame, forcing viewers to look towards the ceiling as opposed to the center of the screen (good thing you can't get neck strains from watching 360° videos in browsers). Thankfully, FromSoftware games have a parameter (LockCamParam) that controls non-cutscene camera positions.

Edited February 1 by sn0wsh00
added more info