360 degree panorama

Started by Doofus, December 23, 2006, 05:26:10 AM

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BPauba

I feel your pain doofus! I stitched together many renders in my tg0.9 days! Twas hard and I learned alot from it!





These are not 360 degree renders, but i did turn the camera 10 degrees each render and it the camera was set to a pretty extreme viewing angle. One thing suggestion i would give is to distort the images with a transform tool(in photoshop). This will help with lining everything up. AND to use brushes in the mask instead of gradients. Good work on the panorama by the way, i feel your pain with the hardships that come along with those images!

Doofus

WOW!! They are some amazing images dude.
I know I could get some better results using brushes for the masks and fading more particular areas, but I want to automate this process so that is not really a realistic proposition. Ultimately I would like to be able to create animated spherical panoramas (preferably HDRI) for the ultimate in environment domes in other 3D apps.

Oshyan - Unfortunately I have Photoshop 7, not CS and none of those apps support HDR images either (at the moment). I tried stitcher previously but didn't find it easy to work with, nor was it possible to automate the process as I can with a photoshop action and batch image processing. As long as I am consistent in my naming conventions with TG2 renders, I can do the final stitching part with a single batch command in photoshop and get passable, but not perfect results.
I think there are some improvements that can be made through TG2 settings however to produce more consistent lighting (possibly through reducing the effect of GI) and some more work on image sizes and FOV angles to get better, more efficient image strips to combine that will display less of the banding I mentioned before which at the moment is my main issue.
Rub a little funk on it baby :D

helentr

#17
Quote from: JavaJones on December 23, 2006, 05:34:01 PM
There are quite a lot of applications out there that do very good automated panorama stitching from an arbitrary number of images. I suggest using one of those, except I'm not sure if any support full 32bit/channel HDR images. Some maybe 16bit/channel, but I don't know beyond that. Of course Photoshop CS2 supports 32bit/channel images and has an ok stitching function so perhaps that could be used?

Some of the available tools:
http://stitcher.realviz.com/
http://webuser.hs-furtwangen.de/~dersch/
http://www.d-vw.com/D_Joiner/index.htm

- Oshyan

None of the panorama stitching programs work with OpenEXR or HDR images, AFAIK.
For HDR images stitching, there is cube2cross (free) by Sean O'Malley http://www2.cs.uh.edu/~somalley/hdri.html - works with 90 degree FOV images (which in older Terragen versions can be done automatically with a script).
There are some programs (free and commercial) for working with OpenEXR and (RGBE) HDR images - there is a large list at http://luminance.londonmet.ac.uk/webhdr/software.shtml - I would add to that list HDRIE http://www.acm.uiuc.edu/siggraph/HDRIE/ for Windows (no OpenEXR support - free).
HDR Shop http://gl.ict.usc.edu/HDRShop/ can take a cross mapping and convert to many others (v.1 is free for non commercial use). HDRIE can do the same conversion.

Helen

Doofus

Many thanks helentr for all the links and help. I will check them out over the Christmas period and hopefully come up with a good reliable way of making HDR panoramas by New Year. :)
Rub a little funk on it baby :D

rcallicotte

Doofus, great idea to get us all thinking.   :P
So this is Disney World.  Can we live here?

Doofus

#20
I have had a bit of luck with the HDRI panoramas.
Unfortunately it makes use of 3DS Max which I know puts it out of reach of a lot of people, but there are just not that many apps that work well with HDR Images.

Anyway, I hope some people find this usefull, and I look forward to hearing what you think, what I have done wrong, what I could do better and what I should have done to start with. Especially any suggestions on how to remove the pinching at the poles when the result is wrapped around a spherical environment.
Cheers :)


One thing I think I missed out from the guide is that you will want to turn off the environment light as the GI for each individual frame will cause variations between your strips.
Rub a little funk on it baby :D

DeanoD

Doof.. got an idea.. Check your PM
' Dont Worry.. i crash better than anybody i know '

Mel Gibson
Air America
Anything, Anywhere, Anytime.

Doofus

OK. A new method. This one works a bit better than the last one.
It requires for a full 360 degree spherical panorama 26 renders, but for my uses I just want sky, so 17 renders.
Full OpenEXR / HDRI Output.
Accurate distortions at the poles.
And it is automatable to a degree.
It still uses 3DS Max for OpenEXR stitching.
I will put together a tut if anyone is interested?

Check the attached image for the results. :)
Rub a little funk on it baby :D

mi

Quote from: Doofus on December 28, 2006, 08:45:12 AM
OK. A new method. This one works a bit better than the last one.
It requires for a full 360 degree spherical panorama 26 renders, but for my uses I just want sky, so 17 renders.
Full OpenEXR / HDRI Output.
Accurate distortions at the poles.
And it is automatable to a degree.
It still uses 3DS Max for OpenEXR stitching.
I will put together a tut if anyone is interested?

Check the attached image for the results. :)


Hello to all
I am very interested in such tutorial since I will be involved in production which will utilise HDRI as an enviromental lightning source from TG2 in Max9.
cheers
Michal

MeltingIce

I think you guys are making this way more complicated that it needs to be.  Just use cube2cross and render out 6 times, then use something like HDRShop to convert it to a longitudinal format or light probe format, depending on which you want.

MeltingIce Network | Wii Number: 3881 9574 8304 0277

Doofus

The attached image was taken from the HDR Shop website as an example of the issues I have with the Cube2Cross method. I have highlited a red dotted line running about a third of the way up from the bottom of the image and it shows where the join is between the bottom of the six images in the cross and the four side views. There is an obvious break which while it may be fine for a lightmap, stands out when you use the panoramas as environment spheres.
What I want is to add more subdivisions than the six to reduce the amount of stretching that any one plane has to perform. I admit that my inital attempt with 72 divisions was overdoing it, but I am now down to 26 for a full 360 degree spherical panorama, basically the same system as a cube but working in 45 degree steps instead of 90. This give you three layers of 8 planes each and one plane at the poles.
The sky I uploaded earlier just uses the top half of this as that is all I actually need (17 images), but essentially the distortion is halved compared to the cube2cross method. If you look for the line where the projections change from being the straight up one, to the top row or the horizontal row of planes you won't find it like I have on the Cube2Cross version.
Rub a little funk on it baby :D

Sethren

Goodness i really hope that Matt implements render options like Vue 6 infinite has like 360 Spherical Panoramic rendering. Right now i am doing a project for a company that i work for that requires the creation of HDRI Lighting using cubic maps and or light probes but sense i can not afford Vue 6 Infinite nor do i have the time or computing power to render out 6 individual Terragen 2 renders to stitch let alone afford any stitching software i am in quite a bind here.

Doofus

Sethren - Quite often, if all you need is a lightmap, much smaller, low res renders will suffice. They usually give perfectly acceptable results in other 3D apps. My problem was that I wanted to use them as environment backdrops as well as lightmaps and then you need higher res renders. If you are using video backdrops or something like that to composite onto, a low res cubic panorama like melting ice suggests will work fine and won't take that long to make. But I agree, I hope panoramic rendering is added to TG2 before too long. It is my main use for the software. Clouds and atmospheres that TG2 produces are simply not realistically achievable in more traditional 3D apps, but a panoramic environment map that can act as ligting rocks my virtual world :)
Rub a little funk on it baby :D

DeanoD

I would be very interested in a Tut! looks like you have cracked it! ;D
' Dont Worry.. i crash better than anybody i know '

Mel Gibson
Air America
Anything, Anywhere, Anytime.

Sethren

True, i can do lower res. Now if i can get the camera to work right but still i need to stitch using free software if any.