Strange edges when render a 360 pano

[Onkelpoe]

hi there,

I wonder, why I get this strange edges, when doing a 360 render with FOV 90. Am I missing something? What is wrong?

(Please see attached image and .tgd file)

edit: Sorry, I forgot to mention: When you render the sequence and place the outcome of frame 1 next to the result of frame 4 - you´ll see the edges. (The image I attached was processed within another program - but the edges origin from TG renderer...)

edit2: Ok, I´ll test it tomorrow...

[choronr]

Try putting the sun directly overhead and see if you get the same thing.

[Onkelpoe]

Ok, when sun is 90 deg. above, then the edges are gone - but the shadows, too 

[choronr]

Ok, when sun is 90 deg. above, then the edges are gone - but the shadows, too 

Now, that was expected, wasn't it. You need to reposition the sun such that you will get a better point of view yielding what you are after.

[bigben]

This looks like differences due to GI between frames.  This problem shows up most when you have a lot of shade in one 90° face and lots of light areas in the adjacent face

[Hafgandil]

The problem is indeed the GI caching, but if you reassemble the images in another program anyway, there is a better workflow to use. Try not to render the images at 90 fov but 110, then you got enough room to stitch the images correctly together and blend them, so no edges are visible anymore. Of course you need a panorama stitching tool, but it is worth it. I use this workflow as well and I can suggest a great tool for the stitch work.

You either use PTGui (it's really expensive I think) or Panorama Studio Pro. It's not that expensive and works like a charme.
Also this workflow is described in more detail by this guy: http://www.planetside.co.uk/forums/index.php?topic=11608.0
Check him out, I learned it this way too

Greetings

[bigben]

Any of the free stitching programs will do for this sort of work as you have known image sizes and positions.  But even with 110° you will still see differences in this situation. While the feathering of seams will help disguise the terrain, you might still get have problems with the sky.

You could try increasing the GI blur radius but I've found in cases of extreme lighting differences you have to blur it so much that the lighting turns to mush anyway.  You could try with fill lights instead of GI. There's a sticky post in the file sharing section.  I also dabbled with this a bit specifically for panoramas (http://www.planetside.co.uk/forums/index.php/topic,1368.0.html)

The spherical camera in TG3 is really the best for this if you want to use GI (which you do 'cos it rocks).

[Dune]

I have the same issue with my museum panorama. Over very light (snowy) areas the sky is lighter than in adjacent renders. But it's easily remedied in PS. If you use fills, you lose the great GISD.

[Onkelpoe]

Thanks for all the answers.

I want to keep radiance format (like .exr or .hdr) - not every /free!) stiching tool could handle this... maybe "Hugin" - but I have not tried yet...

So I guess, the best option is to play with different sun-angles and if that does not help
and I do not want fill-light or pay for another tool - I have to manually adjust it in a image processing program like gimp or something.

@Dune

how is the workflow for tweaking this problem manually? Would you may tell me?

happy X-Mas @ll

[Matt]

Doesn't the spherical camera in TG3 do what you want? You wouldn't need to do any stitching then.

Matt

[Onkelpoe]

I checked back at the office - it is Terragen 2, not 3... so is there a plugin to simulate such a cam in v2?

[Dune]

I just used the darken tool, very soft and for medium tones and after that the light tones. Very carefully administered. I have 2 renders side by side in 2 layers (they fit together pixelperfect) and darken the lightest. That way you can easily see what you do, even on pixel level.

[Onkelpoe]

Any of the free stitching programs will do for this sort of work as you have known image sizes and positions.  But even with 110° you will still see differences in this situation. While the feathering of seams will help disguise the terrain, you might still get have problems with the sky.

You could try increasing the GI blur radius but I've found in cases of extreme lighting differences you have to blur it so much that the lighting turns to mush anyway.  You could try with fill lights instead of GI. There's a sticky post in the file sharing section.  I also dabbled with this a bit specifically for panoramas (http://www.planetside.co.uk/forums/index.php/topic,1368.0.html)

The spherical camera in TG3 is really the best for this if you want to use GI (which you do 'cos it rocks).

Ok, I used your "fill lights"-file and turned GI down to zero, zero, zero. The downside is, the clouds in the sky getting way too noisy ;(
I want to render some skies, so the fill-lights-solution seems not to be the best one for that. GI sucks bad, when rendering a 360 pano with 6 FOV 90 images (I use the "Skybox Tutorial" script, but with 90 instead of 110 FOV, because I do not want to stich the images togehter)

But if you put togehter a skybox from this 6 images - you can spot the seams of the images at first sight, with eyes half closed.

Hmmm... seems there is no other solution, instead of buying PTGui and stiching or buying TG 3 PRO (!) and use the spherical cam.


Is there no other way? Like turning some renderer-features off or set a certain sun-heading/angle??

[Oshyan]

GI Caching *should* fix this problem. It's available in 2.x. Are you using it? Documentation here:
http://www.planetside.co.uk/wiki/index.php?title=Terragen_2_Global_Illumination#Rendering_with_GI_cache_files
To use it for a still panorama, you would want to render out a cache file for each image in your panorama (prior to primary rendering), and save each one numbered sequentially, e.g. gicache0001.gic, gicache0002.gic, etc. Then use a sequence identifier for the specified cache file, e.g. gicache%04d.gic, and specify "equal blend within range", with the "Number of files to blend" being equal to the number of pano tiles you have (same as the number of .gic files you generated).

- Oshyan

[Onkelpoe]

Ok, I try it, when i am back at the office. At home, I only got the free edition and could not make use of the GI cache thing.

Thank you very much for this hint! I hope, it will work for us...

Maybe I should nag my boss about buying TG 3 Pro anyways...