Mettle releases SkyBox VR Player for After Effects

Tools developer Mettle has released SkyBox VR Player: a free add-on enabling artists to preview VR content on the Oculus Rift directly inside After Effects, Premiere Pro or SpeedGrade.

The player removes the need to render and manually re-encode VR content into a format viewable on the Rift.

View VR content directly inside After Effects’ standard workspace
SkyBox VR Player runs in either 360-degree preview mode or, in After Effects and Premiere Pro, in Workspace Mode, which also shows the host UI, and is designed for tweaking effects in context.

The player supports positional tracking, so as well as zooming the display with the mouse, you can simply lean in towards to your monitor to get the expected effect.

Pricing and availability
SkyBox VR Player is free. It runs on After Effects CC 2014+, Premiere Pro CS6+, or any version of SpeedGrade that uses Mercury Transmit, on Windows only. Obviously, you’ll need an Oculus Rift to make use of it.

It’s designed to integrate with Mettle’s commercial VR plugin suites, SkyBox and SkyBox Studio, but as far as we can see, you don’t need either of them to use it.

Read more about SkyBox VR Player on Mettle’s website
(Includes download links for both the plugin and the manual)