Hi iaec,
The simplest way to do that, without the help of plug-ins (Mettle), is to set up six “solids” in Ae. If you have an equirectagular, you need to create the six textures for it.
Please note that you need to change the output to the quality you have. Place your 360ºx180º in the material and render the six frames out.
From camera projection to VR is a wide stretch, in most cases, or let me say in all with one camera only, this will not work. The projected image is perhaps great from the render camera perspective, but in the opposite direction it will fail.
There is much more needed, many camera projection set ups.
In both cases, the render camera is kind of limited in its movement. The main question would be, why not using C4D in Ae or why not producing things in Ae and import this into C4D for example. I use C4D often for large iamge conversions and I would not even think about to do this with Ae. I love to stay in C4D as it has image tools that are far above most other apps, when it comes to Equirectangulars. Each time an image is converted, the quality goes down. There is no option that it can even go up. Hence why to use an equirectangular directly in C4D is the way to go. To use even any cross or other format will lead to roughly 50% to 70% of the initial quality. I do currently for my art 360s in 25K and for 3D it depends but mostly at least 50K and above. Those qualities to produce have a price, even if time alone is what we pay for it. To throw that away and limit this quality must have obviously then a very good reason.
Perhaps you might tell a little bit more, as I’m not clear about the target, and in general such a question would require a few days hands on course to go through everything…
All the best
