[RELEASE] 360° Omnidirectional Stereo & VR180 ODS Rendering — TrueODS Distributed | Lumen, Seamless Volumetrics, HDR EXR & Multi-Machine

[TrueODS]

Hi everyone, I’m the developer of TrueODS, a Movie Render Queue plugin for rendering stereoscopic 360° panoramas and VR180 ODS in Unreal Engine. It supports Lumen, seamless volumetric rendering, linear HDR EXR output and resuming interrupted renders. Here are some results, with the original files available to download.

UE 5.7 / 5.8 · Windows 64-bit Editor · MRQ · DirectX 12 · Deferred rendering

Both editions are now available on Fab:

• TrueODS — base edition: Personal US$399.99
• TrueODS Distributed: Personal US$1,499.99

_{Personal-tier USD list prices. See Fab for applicable taxes and regional pricing.}

Seamless volumetric rendering

The checkpoint below shows fog and lighting across a full 360° panorama. The previews switch between the left and right eye to show parallax on a flat screen; download the stereo files to view them in a compatible player and headset.

Download the multi-machine rendering sample · MP4, 87.5 MB

_{Pole Mono Merge blends the eyes toward mono near the top and bottom poles for viewing comfort; this can appear as ghosting.}

Supported fog and volume types include:

• Height fog and volumetric fog
• Mesh-based volume materials, such as fog volumes
• Local Fog Volumes
• Volumetric Clouds
• VDB / heterogeneous volumes
• Custom fog effects

Niagara sprites and ribbons render seamlessly with default settings, using either CPU or GPU simulation. No additional configuration is needed. Particle cards for steam, rain, airborne dust and smoke are also supported.

Stereo depth indoors

8K original PNG · Same-resolution JPG · Coffee-shop stereo video

_{Pole Mono Merge blends the eyes toward mono near the top and bottom poles for viewing comfort; this can appear as ghosting.}

8K stereo rendering performance

8K original PNG · Same-resolution JPG

_{Pole Mono Merge blends the eyes toward mono near the top and bottom poles for viewing comfort; this can appear as ghosting.}

Research lab

Render time per 8K stereo frame (both eyes): RTX 5090 ~44 s · RTX 4090 ~56 s · measured in Unreal Engine 5.7

Coffee shop

Render time per 8K stereo frame (both eyes): RTX 5090 ~48 s · RTX 4090 ~59 s · measured in Unreal Engine 5.7

These published benchmarks were measured during prerelease testing. 8K is the test resolution; output resolution is configurable. Actual times vary with scene, settings and hardware.

Test conditions and heavy-scene reference

How the times were measured: Unreal Engine 5.7 with the default TSR anti-aliasing, 8192 × 4096 per eye, 150% supersampling, Paced memory mode, the same plugin version and settings on both machines (RTX 5090 + i9-13900KF, RTX 4090 + i7-13700KF). Each time is the average of the 10 intervals between 11 consecutively saved frames, including stitching and saving the output, excluding project startup and warm-up. The timed frames come from the same scenes as the previews but are not the frames shown. Actual times vary with scene, settings and hardware.

Heavy-scene reference: a confidential project whose images cannot be shown; a heavier scene rendered on Unreal Engine 5.7, settings as above. Both machines rendered the same 6 consecutive frames with the same settings (average of the 5 intervals between them): RTX 5090 ~234 s · RTX 4090 ~304 s per 8K stereo frame.

Single-workstation and multi-machine workflows

TrueODS includes the rendering features above and support for resuming interrupted renders.

TrueODS Distributed includes those features plus Engine-Level Temporal Lock and Multi-Machine Rendering. It supports rendering sections of one shot across several machines, or in separate runs on one machine. Configuration checks, frame-range allocation and output completeness checks are included.

You deploy the project, start renders on each machine and copy the output back for collection. Temporal Lock maintains scene-time continuity; simulations may still need caching, warm-up and checks at the joins. See the edition comparison and workflow.

Rendering video tutorials

TrueODS base edition — basic rendering workflow (English):

TrueODS | 360° Stereo Rendering Tutorial — Base Edition (English)

TrueODS Distributed — multi-machine rendering workflow (English):

TrueODS Distributed | Multi-Machine Rendering Tutorial (English)

Samples, documentation and feedback

Documentation and all sample downloads · Quick Start · Compatibility and FAQ

If you work on pre-rendered 360° or VR180 ODS content, I’d be interested to hear which part of the workflow is hardest to get right in your projects.

Support: trueodssupport@gmail.com

_{The samples above are 360° renders. Demo scenes, characters and third-party assets are not included with the plugin. Environment credits: Leartes Studios (Coffee Shop Environment) and Tirgames Assets (Sci-Fi Creatures Research Lab).}

Pre-sales questions and demos: Telegram · WhatsApp.

[TrueODS]

Upcoming update: Render Passes for 360° and VR180 rendering

Here’s a preview of what we’re adding next to TrueODS and TrueODS Distributed: four optional Render Passes for compositing.

• Depth — distance from the eye to the visible surface.
• World Normal — surface orientation in world space.
• World Position — surface coordinates in world space.
• Custom Stencil — object stencil values for masks.

Each pass is saved as a lossless EXR, with the same output size and stereo layout as the rendered image. The update also adds separate left/right-eye files, a folder for each pass, and filenames that can end with the frame number for easier sequence imports.

The animation cycles through the rendered image → Depth → World Normal → World Position, preserving the complete top/bottom stereo frame: left eye above, right eye below. Depth is shown on a log scale, normals as RGB, and world position as a 1 m grid over the image.

Full-resolution originals — 4096 × 4096 JPEGs:
Rendered image · Depth · World Normal · World Position

Download all four original JPEGs (ZIP, 16.6 MB)

These downloads contain the full-resolution JPEG visualizations shown above, not the underlying EXR data. Pole Mono Merge blends the eyes toward mono near the poles; this may appear as ghosting in the panorama.

Scope and current limitations

Render Passes support equirectangular output with the Deferred renderer, for 360°/180°, mono or stereo. They are not available with Path Tracing or Cubemap Faces.

Glass, particles and other translucent surfaces are excluded from the pass data. World Normal outputs zero for surfaces with Unlit materials and for open sky without a surface; it is unavailable with Substrate or forward shading. Custom Stencil requires Enabled with Stencil in the project’s Custom Depth-Stencil settings and Render CustomDepth Pass on the relevant objects.

This is a preview of the next update, not a feature in the current release.

[TrueODS]

Upcoming 1.0.1 hotfix

Two fixes are complete for the next TrueODS update:

• Render Whole Sequence: fixed an issue where using a saved MRQ preset could render only one frame instead of the full sequence.
• Background rendering: fixed an issue where the render window could capture mouse input and prevent normal clicking while rendering in the background.

These fixes are not yet available in the current Fab downloads. Version 1.0.1 has been submitted to Fab for both editions and is awaiting review. The current release remains available to buy and download; we’ll confirm here when the hotfix is live.