Got bored on the train (both cores running slow TG renders) so I fired up the database again
Starting work on converting a workflow I developed for TG0.9 for producing animations with extreme FOVs and different lens projections. There are numerous permutations of doing this but I will concentrate mainly on 2.
My original workflow rendered 6 cube faces which were then stitched to an equirectangular image and an image extracted from this with the correct camera orientation. While this may seem a little convoluted, it does allow for changes in the camera angle without requiring a re-render (if you keep the stitched images)
This would be easy enough to implement in TG2, but this time I'm going to render the cube faces with the camera orientation primarily to reduce the need to render all 6 images per frame (e.g. a 180° circular fisheye image won't require the back face). To ensure commands are synchronised the rendering and stitching of each frame will be done on one computer, but of course it will still be possible to split the batch files across multiple computers (I knew there was a reason I kept that in the project)
It will still be possible to render all 6 faces and then change the camera orientation later (or generate multiple camera angles along the same path without requiring a re-render!). The exact method I use is still to be determined but I think it's possible to do it without any additional calculations.
The second option will use two adjacent 90° renders for situations where only extra width is required. This will be faster to render but will be less flexible with what you can do afterwards.
Stitching, remapping and reprojection will be handled via commandline with PTSTitcher from Panorama Tools. On the TG side of things, you'll need a duplicate copy of the TGD for each component image required. A CHAN file will be generated for each TGD and of course a bacth file(s) to put it render it and put it all together.
The screen grab shows an over simplified hack so far. A bit more math to go on the pitch angles.
