TIL the hard way: my 8k VR gallery export was not what I thought

I spent 3 months building a VR art piece for a gallery showing in Portland. I was sure the 4k headset preview was good enough. Then I exported a test at 8k for the actual event screen and it was a mess. The textures that looked fine on the small panel turned to blurry soup on the 120 inch projection. What got me was the lighting, the ambient occlusion baked way too dark and it killed the whole mood. I had to re-render 60% of the scenes in 4 days. The lesson was that preview resolution lies to you, you have to output at the real target early. Has anyone else had a gallery install or public display totally change how their work reads?

1 comments

1 Comment

jenniferwells19d ago

The 4K preview versus 8K projection thing, I have seen that bite a few friends in digital painting. But I actually look at it the opposite way. For me, the small screen is where I find the truth. A big projection hides your mistakes because everything gets soft and forgiving. It is the 8k export that finally shows you every lazy texture and muddy shadow you got away with on the headset. Sounds like the re-render was painful, but it gave you a better piece in the end.