How to make 360° videos using Blender

Take a look at this video:

This is a 360 video, using youtube's latest thing called snoopavision.

360 videos are not new, but youtube supporting is is new.

Here's how to create one yourself in blender.

In blender, you should setup your scene first.

Here's mine:



Do note that 4k resolution is the best for 360 videos, as the final video will zoom in on each frame, and a 1080s video might be blurry. 4k resolution is 3840px *  2160px.

Then, if you render it, you get a normal image:

However, this will not give us a 360 video. What we are looking for is an equirectangular image.

To do this, select the active camera, and change the lens type to 'Panoramic'. You also want to change the type box to equirectangular

That's it. You're done. Except that youtube does not detect 360 videos automatically. In order to do so, follow this steps:

Before you render, you should change your output settings to this:

This is because the spatialmedia program seems to only accept mp4 and mov videos, so we have to set it to mp4 output as blender doesn't support mov videos.

Visit the youtube 360 upload guide, and go to step 2. Download the 360 degree program. Here, I will use the python script. If you use the GUI for windows or mac, you can follow the steps there.

After I added an alias for the command, I can now run the command. 

The most basic will be to use the -i flag. This will inject the 360 video metadata, so that youtube can detect that it's a 360 video.

So the command would be something like 

  spatialmedia -i input.mp4 output.mp4

And you're done.

Upload the output file to youtube, and enjoy the wonders of technology.