Terragen to 360° Panorama to QTVR software (Windows)

[bigben]

Hi All

I've prepared a cut down set of utlilities that I use for creating QTVR files from Terragen.  I prefer these tools because they offer a good range of customisation of settings whilst being relatively easy to use. The software included is PTStitcher from Panorama Tools <http://webuser.hs-furtwangen.de/~dersch/> and PanoCUBE <http://www.panoshow.com/panocube.htm>.

It's a two stage process, producing a stitched 360° panorama (TIFF) from 6 cube faces which is then used to create a QTVR. Usage instructions are included in the README.txt file. I've restricted the instructions to just this specific task and not any of the other possible uses for PTStitcher.

Please read the README.txt before posting questions 

Update 27/02/2007: Added an extra script to create a cylindrical stitched image from 4 x 90° images. This is mainly for those who produce still images rather than QTVR, giving you a taller image. Also added the documentation for PTStitcher for those techy enough to fiddle more.

Update 28/02/2007: Created a self-extracting archive to simplify setup. (Zipped for posting here). Files are extracted to C:\TG2QTVR\ and a setup batch file configures the various components.

Update 8/03/2007: Posted a separate supplement with various scripts for PTSticher, TG and Photoshop to create a high res panorama from 10 degree tiles. This is a workaround to overcome crashes when a 90° tile won't render due to insufficient RAM. File: TG2QTVR_10deg_pano.zip

TG2QTVR_update.zip: Contains additional scripts, batch files created since the last update and the latest README.txt

Enjoy

Ben

[king_tiger_666]

Cool, if this can do panoramas like on your site though all rendered:D.. worth a try!

thanks for the linkys

[bigben]

Thanks.

Here's a couple of samples.

http://www.path.unimelb.edu.au/~bernardk/terragen/gallery/mov/night_v4+all.mov (329kb)
TG0.9 panorama, plus rendered haze/cloud masks, plus panorama of HNSKY star map, plus modified full sky panorama, plus mirror of composited sky for lake reflections.  (composited in Photoshop)

http://www.path.unimelb.edu.au/~bernardk/terragen/gallery/mov/mt_abrupt_low.mov (714kb)
TG0.9. Grampians and surrounds from Mt Abrupt using surfaces masked by images derived from Landsat pics.  I'm reworking this one in TG2 but it's going to be a while. This is my primary "see how far you can push an idea" project.

[Dark Fire]

The star map in that first one is very nice, but I liked the second panorama best...

Thanks for the software links!

[bigben]

The panorama still appears to be distorted (vertical line with sudden change in direction of edges of clouds at 90° intervals). Did you use this software to stitch them together or did you try and cheat?

I've also produced an update with a script for creating a panoramic image with a cylindrical projection ffrom 4 images. This should cover the main usage for 360° panoramas.

[king_tiger_666]

that first one was a cheat, as i got frustrated with ptstitch

however I think i have figured it just rendering a sky & bottom frame and i shall post a complete pano done with panocube and ptstitch...

[king_tiger_666]

ok I replaced it with the first url fully made with ptstitch and panocube and I must say it stitched the images together a lot better than when i took the easy road and cheated:P:P:P on the first step

http://homepages.slingshot.co.nz/~rawjdmbj/terragen/panorama/pano.mov 1.3mb

one thing I found was when you first drag PTStitcher.exe into PanoCUBE.exe to make the PCB.INI you need to have all the files in a folder within the c drive root folder without spaces eg c:\pano
PCB.ini will then look like this C:\pano\PTStitcher.exe


I had my folder on the desktop and when I dragged the stitched tiff into panocube it pooped a cmd box looking for c:\documents since the PCB.ini file had C:\Documents and Settings\Ben\Desktop\TG2QTVR\TG2QTVR\PTStitcher.exe

not sure if this was part of your readme but I didn't see it..

[bigben]

Thanks for reminding me. I'd forgotten that PTStitcher is sensitive to spaces in directory names because I've always used simplified directories. I learnt to use Panorama Tools a long time ago via commandline so short directory names saved a lot of typing    There are now some very good GUIs incorporating/based upon these tools, but for these purposes the original clunky tools are still very useful.  Glad to see I've managed to convince at least one person that stitched. remappped panos are better than "cheating"   

I've created a basic autoinstall using a self-extracting archive which should help avoid this issue (and advanced users can still manually extract the files).