Stitching images...

[HomerJohnston]

Hi there, I've got a sort of issue on hand... I have a photo I took which I want to make a print of, but it's an odd aspect ratio (about 2:1, wide)... and I've already spent 20 bucks in gas and 6 hours travelling/hiking trying to recapture the image, but ... I don't think I'll quite get the lighting ever again.

Sooo then I found Terragen. My goal is to produce a fake sky with T2 (since it seems to be the only program capable of truly photorealistic skies I can find! Kudos to the dev's!) and make the image taller for a normal frame aspect ratio (30"x20")

The problem is that this is really my only use for Terragen, and although it's amazing software... $200 is pricey for the one personal use I currently have for it

...but I need a final sky render about 8000x3600 pixels...

So naturally my first idea is... make a bunch of 800x600 renders and use Hugin to stitch them (same as I used to make the 8000px wide digital image)... basic math determines this would be at least 100 renders though, lol, and I'm worried about difficulty stitching the images together (a few spots of almost totally uniform color)

in a blatant effort to spark some interest, here's the image I want to create (sky I rendered at 800x360... took just under an hour)



Well, what can I say... anyone got any helpful (or heck... even derogotory) suggestions? (hehe, or can anyone come up with a more suitable sky?)

I presume if I do a bunch of renders, I will actually need to use a stitching program that accounts for lens distortion? (in other words, won't be able to just merge them in photoshop)

Thanks...

[bigben]

It's not exactly a state secret, and there are other advantages to registering....

Hugin is based on Panorama Tools... you can't manually specifiy the parameters for each image?  No need for selecting control points or auto-stitching.

[HomerJohnston]

Good point on possibility of stitching with manually set info for each render instead of control points... I'll have to have a crack at that.

There's definitely advantages to registering, and ... these guys sure deserve being paid for their work... but... using Terragen isn't what I do ... it'd be like buying a cement truck, because I was building a garage :p

Anywho--that may help -- thanks for the lead.. perhaps you'll never hear from me again

[moodflow]

What about going out one day and taking some sky pano photos?  I have over 100 of them I've taken here in CA, and the resolutions in some cases are over 12K wide.  Then use photoshop to blend it in to your image.

As for pano software, I use autostitch, which is 100% free, and works the best so far compared to the other panorama software I've tried.  The only drawback is, it only works with JPEG images.  But if you keep the quality at 100%, the degradation is effectively unnoticable.

[HomerJohnston]

That was sort of my other idea... initially I thought it would be worse off to do, but now that you've got me thinking about it, maybe that's not the case. Guess I ought to start carrying my camera around with me all the time in case I find the right sky one evening...

Ok, well via one way or the other, I should be able to get a fix for my photo... thanks for the help guys!

[FrankB]

So why not simply render the whole thing?

Drop your photo back in your drawer, get a Digital Elevation Model from the mountain area in question and use that as the terrain. The texturing doesn't look impossibly complicated, so as I said, you may be able to render terrain and sky at once :-)

Who knows, the fake (rendered) image might be better than the original ;-)

Cheers,
Frank

[buchvecny]

i think stitching is no problem. the newest cs3 photoshop does fully automated stitching and if u obey the basic rules (20% overlaying each render) it should be no problem

[HomerJohnston]

A full size render would have better "image quality" than the photograph... but renders have a long ways to go yet before they capture the detail of a complicated real life scene. Sky however, exists in various complexities ranging from a single color... to absolutely nuts... so faking something "more difficult" than a single color can be done, as T2 demonstrates!

I rendered a half a dozen or so and it seemed like stitching will be fairly doable... which is definitely neat... time to get a couple dual core PC's on the task, 200+hours of rendering time here I come!

CS3 eh... maybe I'll have to upgrade... thanks for the info, stuff like this is why I don't feel embarassed to post kind of pointless questions, lol