OpenGL 360 degree perspective

Question

I'm looking to capture a 360 degree - spherical panorama - photo of my scene. How can I do this best? If I have it right, I can't do this the ordinary way of setting the perspective to 360.

If I would need a vertex shader, is there one available?

Answer 1

This is actually a nontrivial thing to do.

In a naive approach a vertex shader that transforms the vertex positions not by matrix multiplication, but by feeding them through trigonometric functions may seem to do the trick. The problem is, that this will not make straight lines "curvy". You could use a tesselation shader to add sufficient geometry to compensate for this.

The most straightforward approach is two-fold. First you render your scene into a cubemap, i.e. render with a 90°×90° FOV into the 6 directions making up a cube. This allows you to use regular affine projections rendering the scene.

In a second step you use the generated cubemap to texture a screen filling grid, where the texture coordinates of each vertex are azimuth and elevation.

Another approach is to use tiled rendering with very small FOV and rotating the "camera", kind of like doing a panoramic picture without using a wide angle lens. As a matter of fact the cubemap based approach is tiled rendering, but its easier to get right than trying to do this directly with changed camera direction and viewport placement.