Freefall 4K is best experienced using high fidelity HMD (Head-Mounted Display) such as HTC Vive, Oculus Rift or GearVR. Google Cardboard offers a great entry-level budget option for anyone with a smartphone anyone.

You can download the high-quality video for local playback through a link below. If you’d rather watch the streaming version, make sure to set the video quality (gear icon) to at least 1440p.

The original 2015 Freefall was a rather quick exercise – I wanted to see how Octane Render performs with extreme quality textures (source Earth maps were in 16K and above). I needed to test the compositing workflow for stereoscopic VR – mainly unwrapping equirectangular animations to cube maps, adding vfx and then re-wrapping.

Finally, I wanted to give the camera a continuous rotating motion on all three axes to determine the range of speeds that are acceptable for VR viewing. In the end I feel I found a sweet spot where the motion is quite disorienting, yet does not induce nausea.

In late 2016 I decided to remaster this video, resulting in Freefall 4K – a new version of the original experience, improved in nearly every aspect. Special thanks to Noble Rot studios for lending me their render farm and making this project possible.