Need help rendering a panoramic equirectangular movie of a computer game recorded in box projection mode in cycles Firstly, I clearly have taken on something for which I don't have enough blender knowledge, but as I have spent so much time practising to get to this point, I don't want to give in.

I have made a movie recording of a flight in a simulator called DCS World, and want to try and do a 360 movie of a flight. I have set the simulator to display as a box projector with 6 square panels in one video. The video is much smaller in length and resolution than what I will need, but I will record in higher quality, better side-matches etc, when I grasp how I can complete this.

In Blender, I have set the camera as panoramic equirectangular and put the camera inside a cube. I am using cycles render as the panoramic camera options are not available in Blender render. I have UV unwrapped the cube and added the video texture to the cube. If I view the cube in 3D View with material, I can see my the video texture on each of the sides as I would expect. However, if I try to render this as a single image, I only see the front panel, same for as a video. Is there anything I should be looking out for?

The video even though only about 5 seconds long is huge, but I can dropbox it and the blend file if anyone wants to take a look, and point me in the right direction.

Kindest regards

Andy
It is hard to say for sure without the video file, but based on what you provided the answer is pretty simple: your camera is not actually positioned inside the cube.  It is positioned outside the cube, and therefore it's just rendering the face of the cube that's visible to it.  

I made a few minor changes to your file: I repositioned the camera to inside the cube; rotated it 180 degrees to face the "middle" of the image; played with your cube's UV map to get it to fit the still you provided; and changed the material to an emission shader for visibility.  This was my render:



Is this the type of thing you had in mind?

Edit: since the cockpit still was not posted in the question I am including it here for reference.



with some further tweaking, I got the render to look like this:



It is important that the camera be centered within the cube, you can align the objects by using the Object-->Transform-->Align Objects command.

There are some discontinuities in the image, a few may have to do with my lack of precision in adjusting the UVs, but I think most of them come from the fact that your sample image does not wrap perfectly.  The panel to the top of the center is screwed up somehow, for example it includes additional images of those windshield seams.  Also the seam where the leftmost and rightmost edges join doesn't seem to be a perfect fit.