Software for making cubic movies... revisited

pdonner

Hi, let me revive an interesting thread. Last weekend we had an exciting demonstration by one of our workgroup members, who is specializing in 360 degree panorama. We made an exercise in panorama photography inside the community house. The colleague also included a nice demonstration with one of our house models placed in a panorama landscape. He used the Cubic Pano Output ruby for that purpose.

While working on the panorama material somebody raised the question whether it would be possible to work out something the other way round:

Has somebody experience from mixing Cubic Pano Output with a background from a 360 degree panorama video? The spectator being 'inside' the living room of the model and watching through the window at the panorama photographed landscape.

otb designworks

I do this sort of thing all the time.

First, map the panorama to a large cylinder that wraps the model. This may take using an image editor to cut the panorama into smaller sized images, less than 2048x2048, before bringing them into SU.

Once the mapped cylinder is oriented correctly in the model space, then you can use Cubicpanoout as before.

pdonner

Yes, I guessed right that somebody must have worked on this.

Checked your interesting gallery and found these two examples:

SU model placed in a panorama picture
http://www.otbdesignworks.com/otb-design-works-vt-callaghan-house.html

This is a good demonstration of a mixed view. Fine work. Congratulations.

View from inside a model with panorama landscape visible through the windows
http://www.otbdesignworks.com/otb-design-works-vt-toni.html

Is this an example of what you described? I don't want to sound impolite but here it seems to me that the panorama landscape is visible in the window, but there is little or no sense of 3D perspectives. It is as if the background was glued on the windows.

Or maybe I just didn't find what you were aiming at. Can you kindly direct me to the correct example where the background would be moving when the spectator changes viewpoint. Thanks, ph

otb designworks

Thanks for taking the time to check out some of my earlier works; I appreciate the interest, and thanks for the compliment!

Perspective becomes an issue when working with panoramas, as you had already guessed. The main issue is that the pano is shot from one location, but it is being used to approximate reality throughout, for example, a house. So, there will be unavoidable discrepancies between the virtual tour and actual reality, but, it sure is closer than no picture at all.

I am not quite sure if I understand what you mean by thee background moving when the spectator changes viewpoint. If you are looking for motion, like clouds moving across the windows, or the sun moving around the sky, then that is a different animal that is not going to happen in a QTVR as the QTVR is generated from still images. And, without a lot of fussiness, this sort of animation would probably be better exported from a 3D software that allows you to easily animate objects, which SU is no good at doing, IMO.

pdonner

@unknownuser said:

I am not quite sure if I understand what you mean by thee background moving when the spectator changes viewpoint.

Ok, I'll try to make my point clear by preparing an example. You wrote that you are mapping the panorama background to the surface of a cylinder. Do you have any tools for that?

pdonner

Although a cylinder would apparently produce the best result, the raw material that my kind colleague supplied me was in equirectangular form. So apparently the quick way to the target was not to make a cylinder but a cube. And then we had to place the model into the cube.

Now to demonstrate what I wanted say I rendered these two images which were separated by just a small amount of panning:

During this panning the background is 'moving' as it should.

One more cosmetic problem: How do I add the level of transparency in the standard Translucent Blue Glass texture?

Gaieus

LightUp can use these skyboxes as backgrounds and the export QTVR mov files (as far as I know already mov or just the cube images?).

Also, many rendering sofware has the ability to add spherical/hemispherical backgrounds and then render out some result that is already a panorama.

Regarding your window colour: go to your material browser > In model, there select the window colour and go to the Edit tab. At the bottom, there is the transparency slider (I would use a less blue glass however).

pdonner

Thanks Gaieus for your advice.

@gaieus said:

Regarding your window colour: go to your material browser > In model, there select the window colour and go to the Edit tab. At the bottom, there is the transparency slider (I would use a less blue glass however).

I was ignorant enough to try and edit the stock material, which is apparently attributed read only. The controls were at least disabled. [This item should of course have gone into the newbie forum.]