Since experimenting with 360 videos last week, Facebook have now introduced 360 photographs and it turns out it is incredibly easy to produce and upload cg images, although it does require you to go through a couple of steps. So here is a little tutorial for anyone needing to create 360 content.
We use 3ds Max and V-Ray here at WS so the first part of this tutorial will describe the settings specific to our pipeline, but can be translated to other renderers. The second part will look at what you need to do to prepare your rendered image for upload to Facebook, regardless of software used.
Stage 1 - Render Settings
Set up your camera as you normally would.
Render settings are largely the same as your normal preferences, however under V-Ray > Camera select Spherical Panorama for type and check Override FOV, entering 360.0 for the horizontal override and 180.0 for the vertical override.
Finally, Facebook needs your image to be in a 2:1 ratio with the maximum recommended dimensions being 6000 wide by 3000 high.