Light Field Rendering Blender Plugin

This is a blender plugin to help you synthesize render light field. In effect, you are allow to render a grid of camera positions.

This addon is usable for Blender 2.8+

Installation

To install the plugin, you should go to the Github page and click Download Zip to download the page.

Then open blender and select Edit/Preference → Add-ons, click "Install.." and select the zip file to install. Finally, click the box Render:Light Field Camera.

Usage

Enable Light Field Rendering

If you wish to render with a light field camera, you should first select a camera object in Layout Mode (Make sure it is selected)

Then choose the Object Data Properties panel, you will see a Light Field section, to enable the light field rendering, click the checkbox.

Rendering & Parameters

Now you are able to render the light field with "Render LightField" Button. Which in effect renders with the camera at a grid of positions.

Here are four parameters

• cols/rows: the size of the camera grid, how many rows and columns are there in the camera grid. For example, if you want to render a light field of size 5x5, modify both to 5.
• base x/base y: the distance between two neighbouring camera position measured in meters (blender's unit)

The results will be generated

Tricks

When rendering, press esc to interrupt rendering.

When the light field is enabled of a certain camera, there is a rectangle outline associate with the camera shown in the 3D view. The size of the camera bound the range of the camera grid.

Using in script

You can also use this as script.

For each camera, there is an additional lightfield attribute. You can specify its num_rows num_cols base_x base_y. To render the light field, simply call bpy.ops.render.lightfield().

import bpy
import numpy as np

def render(camera):
    """
        cam is the camera object
        """
        lf = camera.lightfield
        lf.enabled = True
        lf.num_rows = ... # input number of rows
        lf.num_cols = ... # input number of columns
        lf.base_x = ... # base x
    lf.base_y = ... # base y
        bpy.ops.render.lightfield()