Blender
This Getting Started Guide is for the Looking Glass Factory Blender Add-on. Our Blender Add-on features:
support for both Eevee and Cycles rendering
non destructive camera creation
quilt presets & support for custom quilt settings
support for regular and multi-view rendering systems.
live-display of the camera view in the Looking Glass
The current version of the add-on requires Blender 2.93 or newer. You can download blender here and the blender add-on here.
If you have not done so, install HoloPlay Service.
Open Blender, and go to Edit → Preferences → Add-ons → Install....
Select the .zip and click "Install Add-on from file" on the top right.
Enable the add-on by checking the box next to it on the left.
Install Python dependencies by pressing "Install Dependencies" -- this should appear once you enable the add-on.
Click "Save User Settings" to keep the add-on enabled.
Restart Blender (recommended).
The main UI can be found in the Sidebar → Looking Glass Tab.
Instead of adding 45 cameras to your scene as a collection, we now create those cameras behind the scenes. Clutter free! In addition you can now control the field of view directly with a single camera, simply grab the eye-dropper from the Looking Glass Tab and select your camera! Our add-on will automatically create a camera rig on top of your camera that you can modify to your hearts content!
You can still render single views out of your camera too! The F12 and Ctrl+F12 hotkeys will still call the normal render functions. The Looking Glass Camera Rig is only utilized when the render quilt or render animation quilt buttons are used!
If you have a Looking Glass plugged into your computer you can toggle live view by clicking the window icon at the top right of the Looking Glass panel. This feature is currently experimental and it will take a significant amount of time for the view to update -- we're working on optimization. In the meantime, you may get better results by changing the update mode of the live view to manual.
You can render quilts directly by using the render quilt or render animation quilt options in the Looking Glass Toolbar. You can choose to save just the resulting quilt image, or the images that make up the quilt. Quilt images will save to the same directory that your normal renderings from blender save to.
Rendering content for the Looking Glass can be demanding depending on which renderer or how heavy your 3D scenes are. For cycles we recommend using a lower amount of samples with denoising turned on. Denoised images are almost identical in quality to high sample count renders and render out much faster than normal since you can lower the sample size to something like 32 samples for super quick renders!
​Christian Stolze​
Gottfried Hofmann
The Blender add-on portion of this project is licensed under the GPL-3.0 License.
