HDR Panorama

[bigben]

Hi All

This is following up from some old work of mine and the recent prod of the panorama post.

I produced a very quick demo of a spherical HDR panorama rendered in TG2 and viewed online via Helmut Dersch's PTViewer... an old but very powerful little java applet.  The panorama itself is not very impressive as it's only 1024x512 pixels, but I wanted to test the workflow with the software I had.

http://www.bigben.id.au/terragen/demo/pano/hdr_test1.html

Workflow:

* Render 6 cube faces from TG2 as .EXR
* Convert to HDR via Photoshop
* Combine to cross layout using Cube2Cross
* Panoramic transformation to Lat/Long in HDRShop v1
* Load HTML doc in browser and determine initial exposure/gamma settings.

This version of PTViewer will display HDR files directly, and also comes with a conversion utility to create a compressed .fjpg file.  I have used the HDR file in this demo.

A previous issue I had with TG0.9 where the sun appeared in a square appears to have been a result of the conversion process to fjpg rather than a problem with the output from TG as I had the same issue in this test (but it's not a problem with the HDR version)

I'll render a higher resolution version of this scene and replace the demo.

Note the way the exposure changes dynamically as you pan around, and you can also adjust the exposure using "b" and "d" to brighten and darken the image respectively.

It's quite an impressive applet given its age and it's still quite useful.   

[Aagam]

Wow man that's pretty awesome, something I'd surely try out!

[old_blaggard]

Very nice work! The timing is silly, because I just finished an HDR panorama for my photography class .

[bigben]

I've changed the clouds a little for the next one and left it rendering at home. May be a day or two away yet.

@OB:  Sorry I'm not psychotic enough to have predicted your need   If you want to try the viewer your can get the files from a directory listing of my demo site. <http://www.bigben.id.au/terragen/demo/pano/>  All you need is the .JAR file and the html doc. All of the clasee files can be extracted from the JAR file. At the very least you may want to look at the source of my HTML to get some starting values for exposure and gamma.  If you don't set them you'll probably find the pano looks completely black except for a white spot (the sun)

I'm using the original viewer <http://webuser.hs-furtwangen.de/~dersch/> (v3.1.2)  If you want to try using floating point JPEGs you'll also find a conversion utility on this page (PTConvert 0.2)

The development of Helmut's earlier viewer was carried on by others <http://www.fsoft.it/panorama/ptviewer.htm>

[HeinzH]

It would be so nice if Terragen could spit out 360 degree pano images in Lat/Lon Format by default.
The maths behind it should be fairly straightforward, no?

Cheers - Christoph
C-:

[Matt]

Hi Christoph, we are going to work on 360 output after final release of 2.0. The main problem at the moment is that the scanline render engine isn't properly set up to map parts of the scene to more than one side of the image. (The ray tracer is better for this.)

[HeinzH]

Ah - I see. Thanks for the quick reply.
Good to hear that it's planned for the future anyway, because I can really see this being a common workflow in order to generate IBL Spheres...

Cheers - Christoph

C-:

[neon22]

This free s/w and instructions on how to set it up here
http://forums.planetside.co.uk/index.php?topic=2816.0

will make a envmap for you. even stitches it all together. not HDR, but only because I do not have a imagemagick build with openexr support. If anyone can find one I will happily make it support hdr also.

If you want to do it manually. check here for some tips: http://forums.planetside.co.uk/index.php?topic=4211.msg44441#msg44441

[KirillK]

Correct me please if I am wrong but that "fov 90" 6 image method works only with GI off.  GI is making images not matching each other.  But I can't reach natural sky look without GI. Clouds looks too dark.   Is there any way to render 360 panorama with GI on?

[Matt]

You can brighten clouds without GI in two ways. The cloud layer and atmosphere nodes each have their own ambient light settings. You could also add additional sunlights that have shadows disabled (this will lighten the landscape too, but that's probably what you want if there is no GI).

Matt

[KirillK]

thanks. I tried it and managed to reach better look but still not the same good as with GI. What I want to do is hdr sky background so I need most real thing as possible. Is there any other option than making a strip of overlapping renders and stitching them in a specialised soft?

[bigben]

Try increasing the GI radius.  I got distracted with my rendering of the larger version by the new beta release, but it worked fine for the small version. Must get back to redoing that.

Or try something like this: http://forums.planetside.co.uk/index.php?topic=1921.0

I made it to provide fill lighting for canyons/overhangs so it may do what you want for clouds.  That said, GI is completely different and is *much* more realistic.

[3dworks]

Hi Christoph, we are going to work on 360 output after final release of 2.0. The main problem at the moment is that the scanline render engine isn't properly set up to map parts of the scene to more than one side of the image. (The ray tracer is better for this.)

any news on this? i'd like to use TG2 also for generating proprietary HDR's for image based lighting in my projects. the solutions i could find on this forum are too complex for when a fast production workflow is needed. after upgrading my 0.9 license to TG2, i'm a bit disappointed not to have any simple option for 360 degree rendering yet. hope this will come soon?

cheers

markus

[Aagam]

Hi Christoph, we are going to work on 360 output after final release of 2.0. The main problem at the moment is that the scanline render engine isn't properly set up to map parts of the scene to more than one side of the image. (The ray tracer is better for this.)

any news on this? i'd like to use TG2 also for generating proprietary HDR's for image based lighting in my projects. the solutions i could find on this forum are too complex for when a fast production workflow is needed. after upgrading my 0.9 license to TG2, i'm a bit disappointed not to have any simple option for 360 degree rendering yet. hope this will come soon?

cheers

markus

360 rendering is still possible to an extent. I've tried a few different ways, but the easiest is to simply render 6 images while turning the camera 90 degrees each time, then completely up and down, and then using another program (such as CubicConverter) to stitch them into a Panorama. A few problems arise with some pictures being brighter than others, causing visible stitch lines in the panorama (I still haven't been able to fix this). I'd love to see Planetside include a 360 output later though!

[jaf]

Yes, as stated, rotating the camera to render slices works well.

There are two free programs I've been using lately for panoramas (Windows).  Microsoft ICE to do the stitching (does a nice job in auto mode and since you are keeping your camera level, auto is all that's needed.)

    http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/redmond/groups/ivm/ICE/

And Wpanorama, a very nice viewer and screen saver.  It will pan 360, up-and-down, or back-and-forth.

    http://www.wpanorama.com/wpanorama.php?r=1243640200