Swiss Panoramic Images + Urban Lines

olishea

I think I need another coffee to read all that again!!

michaliszissiou

OLI, let me translate it for you.
Buy the cheapest camera with a fisheye lenses.
But it has to be capable to work manually.
And learn how to stitch equirectangular panoramas. I did some progress on this (hugin).
But I have a d300 Nikon and a 17mm only wide lenses. (and some expensive lenses like 50mm 1.4, or some nice expensive zoom lenses)
A 17mm means equivalent to ~25mm under dSLR format. Not much for such panoramas.
Is there any cheap adaptor-lenses for use on ipad?
Indeed, only pain came from using my dSLR for such a purpose.

About equirectangular panoramas. I did some search and the only I can understand is that: basically there are two 180º wide square photos, stitched together. A 1x2 format.
Am I right?

michaliszissiou

@unknownuser said:

No, There are 6 photos taken every 60 degrees, then one photo up, and one to two photos down (nadir)

Yeah right, these are technics though. But the finished work shows always two 180º perfect shots, perfectly stitched. Theoretically speaking.

Oli they can be as many photos as you like. Any lenses can work. You have two perfectly round shots in the end that you'll try to stitch. Theoretically speaking...

olishea

I know, my urban panoramas were up to 20 photos wide!! lots of stitching.

You can see any better techniques?

Roger

The backyard Copyright Roger Hawkins 2012 By the way for anyone who is interested Microsoft ICE (Image Composite Editor) is robust, free and easy to use. This is a handheld pano done without a tripod.

Roger

Galera, Spain
This is also a handheld 180 degree pano composed of 18 vertical frames and shot with a 300mm lens. At full resolution you can almost read the license plates on cars. This is the town of Galera (in the heart of Andalucia), Spain which is famous for its cave houses. As I hobbled around the town we passed a street called Calle Quijote just as an old lady threw a bucket of wash water into the street. I asked, "?Donde esta el ingenioso hidalgo?" I got a blank stare and assumed she was not much for literary references.

michaliszissiou

Very nice panoramas, but I need equirectangular 1x2 panoramas. The worse is I need interiors. The worst is that I need hdris and mostly empty places.
I need them badly. Good luck to me.

dale

Thought you might find this interesting.
It is a post over on the Thea site.http://www.thearender.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=73432#p73432
It leads to this website, where you can compose panos online it appears.
http://www.360cities.net/

michaliszissiou

Anyway, I tried with ipad. Lot of noise but some success.
A pure blender sculpt in my home, with some help of additional lighting (I admit it). But environment requirectangular panoramic worked. (some stretching still there, and lot of noise

Roger

@michaliszissiou said:

Anyway, I tried with ipad. Lot of noise but some success.
A pure blender sculpt in my home, with some help of additional lighting (I admit it). But environment requirectangular panoramic worked. (some stretching still there, and lot of noise

[attachment=0:25yr8u6a]testingequirect.jpg[/attachment:25yr8u6a]

So, you are aware of Paul Debevic's work with light probes? I see from your sculpt that you want your pano to serve as both light source and background image. I think I would use the pano as light source and do a small HRI image Photoshopped behind the head. In regard to my panos, had I continued shooting around the nodal point in all directions, the result would have been an equirectangular 1x2 after it had been stitched. You can set up your camera and a gigapan system to do HDRIs and the pano at the same time. The robot will bracket exposures at each camera position befor advancing to the next position.

Roger

Thai shop house

A vertical pano/HDRI showing seven floors of a Thai shop house.

olishea

@roger said:

You can set up your camera and a gigapan system to do HDRIs and the pano at the same time

This is what I am aiming to achieve.

You see in my urban panoramas, some of them are completely 360 degrees but I couldn't post-stitch them into an equirectangular format. They can still serve perfectly for backgrounds but they do not render accurately. Of course you can replace the background but that's not the point.

@unknownuser said:

Very nice panoramas, but I need equirectangular 1x2 panoramas. The worse is I need interiors. The worst is that I need hdris and mostly empty places.
I need them badly. Good luck to me.

Well give me a week or two! I'm going shopping this weekend!

olishea

Roger I will PM you an in-depth reply. Thank you for your wisdom.

@michaliszissiou said:

About equirectangular panoramas. I did some search and the only I can understand is that: basically there are two 180º wide square photos, stitched together. A 1x2 format.
Am I right?

No, There are 6 photos taken every 60 degrees, then one photo up, and one to two photos down (nadir).

Look at the first few images of this tutorial, it shows how tripod is set up with resultant images.

You need 8-9 portrait wide angle photos.

http://www.rosaurophotography.com/html/technical3.html

@michaliszissiou said:

Buy the cheapest camera with a fisheye lenses.
But it has to be capable to work manually.

I need a good quality dslr as I will be using it for other applications too, not just panos. Looking at nikon d5100 or d90, can't decide. The D90 seems to be a more professional oriented camera, I don't care much for better video quality on the d5100. d5100 does not have auto focus built-in either.

It's either this

http://www.jessops.com/online.store/products/85593/show.html

or this

http://www.jessops.com/online.store/products/75332/show.html

Roger

Must modern DSLRs will have a set up for automatic bracketing. You set it for a under exposure, correct exposure and over exposure. You press the shutter once and it will make all three exposures.

pilou

http://fromparis.com/

Despite of the name it's in English!

And go to the technical part

Have fun!

PS And of course don't miss the flying over the Eiffel tower!

olishea

roger i have sent you a loooooong PM

Pilou, you legend Great resource, looks like michalis can use his iPad after all.

You've got me reading all night now!! Time for another coffee.

Gaieus

@michaliszissiou said:

Very nice panoramas, but I need equirectangular 1x2 panoramas. The worse is I need interiors. The worst is that I need hdris and mostly empty places.
I need them badly. Good luck to me.

Why don't you model a room and render a nice panorama of it? Then you could perfectly control the output. Most of the times (with shots like yours) the background is a bit blurry due to the DOF anyway.

Roger

Gai, the way I read it is that Michal wants to capture views of existing rooms and spaces as setting for his interesting sculptures. I think he would rather not model the room and with teh complexity of his forms he would rather not have the additional weight of the setting. Additionally the photo would provide the scenes lighting.

michaliszissiou

Indeed
@Roger @Gaieus
Thank you for your concern.

To model a room. My room for instance.
I can, but, render times will increase rapidly.
I'm laaaaaazzzzy.
The idea behind this is related to a new development of blender sculpting mode.
It's very important to sculpt having a preview of a place, as a background.
Sculpting is not just about construction. It's more about shapes that try to capture lighting. I mean, a flow of shapes, connected, coming from the surrounded place into the smaller details of sculpting. It's the final question about Scale. As we can imitate it in the 3d world. As possible it is, after all.
There isn't anything like an outline around a sculpt. Or around a building if I may say so. An idea, an obsession, when you have it, you can't communicate with your feelings otherwise.
So, we have blender sculpting now, with the ability to render (cycles) under a physically correct GI fast renderer. A GI renderer tends to "eat" carving, casted shadows, as hell.
This is so close to what is happening in real sculpting... I'm impressed.

Sorry for spoiling OLI's thread, but it may demonstrates why it's so important to have such surrounding environments. An easy access on such environments.
@Roger

@unknownuser said: