Using APG with rendered 360x180 images from Bryce [SOLVED]

by **Panolini** » Thu Oct 23, 2014 8:24 am

Using APG with rendered 360x180 images from Bryce [SOLVED]

by Panolini » Thu Oct 23, 2014 8:24 am

Hi

I have been lurking around this forum for some time and found it to be a source for a lot of good tips and help. However, this time I feel a bit lost.

I want to make a tour that has a 360 panorama that I don't want to be a photo, but a designed, virtual room. The reason for this is that I want to make a 3D user interface to navigate the other multimedia content with.

I have tried different ways to make Autopano render the images correctly, but all I get is a result that looks more like modern art than a room. I also tried to "simulate" a GigaPan setup and render the images in a row to make it easier for Autopano.

I've also tried to use a different texture to give Autopano more details to use for control points, but it seems that this is not possible. Is there anything I can do to get Autopano to render the images correctly, or does Autopano need a lot of detail in the image to work?

This is the row of images I made (With more texture). I've also attached two images in the resolution I used on Autopano.

I believe there is an option in Autodesk 3Ds Max to render a scene as a flat 360x180 panorama (which could be used in Panotour), but 3Ds Max is a pricey program to get for this sole task...

Solution found: viewtopic.php?f=2&t=24042#p150411

Attachments

by **Destiny** » Thu Oct 23, 2014 8:36 am

Re: Using Autopano Giga with rendered 360x180 images from Br

by Destiny » Thu Oct 23, 2014 8:36 am

Hi.. Using images from Bryce will not work too well since there is no camera data for it.. I tried a long time ago.. It does an average job of it.. More like a best guess.. and no matter what you do you will get a seam line on a 360 pano so you will need to do an offset in Photoshop to remove it..

Destiny..

by **Cliquetsy** » Thu Oct 23, 2014 8:48 am

Re: Using Autopano Giga with rendered 360x180 images from Br

by Cliquetsy » Thu Oct 23, 2014 8:48 am

What does the resulting stitching look like?

Having no camera data wouldn't be the main problem, I've had Autopano stitch game screenshots of various different games with no problem at all.

by **Panolini** » Thu Oct 23, 2014 8:53 am

Re: Using Autopano Giga with rendered 360x180 images from Br

by Panolini » Thu Oct 23, 2014 8:53 am

That was quick. Thanks for the tip on lens-info. I will try to take 2 images at a time from Bryce into Photoshop, merge them there (that works really well) and try to see if I can get them back into Autopano by that method.

I remember using a GoPro Hero 2 - and for some reason Autopano detected a different lens than it really was, and I had a lot of trouble getting it to work until I could specify manually what lens it was. After that, Autopano rendered the panorama beautifully.

by **Panolini** » Thu Oct 23, 2014 9:03 am

Re: Using Autopano Giga with rendered 360x180 images from Br

by Panolini » Thu Oct 23, 2014 9:03 am

The result looks like this:

I came to think about: I use the same texture on all four walls. It could be that Autopano gets confused by that. I'll try to alter them slightly to make them unique...

by **Cliquetsy** » Thu Oct 23, 2014 9:34 am

Re: Using Autopano Giga with rendered 360x180 images from Br

by Cliquetsy » Thu Oct 23, 2014 9:34 am

Yes, Modern art is the perfect definition to describe that result.

Try maybe giving each wall a slightly different tint, like dominant blue, purple, orange, brown.. sticking to the colours you've already used of course.

Also, since it's "shot" in a straight line, have you tried using that setting in the group settings before detection, it's the Layout part. Single Row or Column, that might help Autopano stitch it without needing the different tints.

by **Panolini** » Thu Oct 23, 2014 9:36 am

Re: Using Autopano Giga with rendered 360x180 images from Br

by Panolini » Thu Oct 23, 2014 9:36 am

I'm rendering the scene with four different walls as we speak... :cool:

Maybe in a future version of Autopano you could work with layers. Let's say you have a template panorama made out of 8 images (6 images in plane by 60 degrees, one top and bottom), with clear indicators for Autopano to use. Than you could put whatever you want on the other layer and Autopano will render according to the template and you can choose to render the other layer based on that...

by **Cliquetsy** » Thu Oct 23, 2014 9:43 am

Re: Using Autopano Giga with rendered 360x180 images from Br

by Cliquetsy » Thu Oct 23, 2014 9:43 am

Panolini wrote:I'm rendering the scene with four different walls as we speak...

Maybe in a future version of Autopano you could work with layers. Let's say you have a template panorama made out of 8 images (6 images in plane by 60 degrees, one top and bottom), with clear indicators for Autopano to use. Than you could put whatever you want on the other layer and Autopano will render according to the template and you can choose to render the other layer based on that...

If Autopano gave that type of option, it would be so much easier for me than trying to draw equis... Maybe you should put that in as a feature request?

Did you try the single row option?

by **Panolini** » Thu Oct 23, 2014 9:52 am

Re: Using Autopano Giga with rendered 360x180 images from Br

by Panolini » Thu Oct 23, 2014 9:52 am

Yes, I thought of that too. I made 4 walls with completely different textures, but the same result in Autopano. In Photoshop, it went surprisingly well.

This is what Photoshop came up with. (Using 8 plane pictures)

by **Cliquetsy** » Thu Oct 23, 2014 9:58 am

Re: Using Autopano Giga with rendered 360x180 images from Br

by Cliquetsy » Thu Oct 23, 2014 9:58 am

Hmm..
Do you think you could share your images?

by **Panolini** » Thu Oct 23, 2014 10:04 am

Re: Using Autopano Giga with rendered 360x180 images from Br

by Panolini » Thu Oct 23, 2014 10:04 am

Here is the last version of the images. It's 8 images, and they are distributed in 45 degree increments.

Attachments

BryceRoom.rar: (4.68 MiB) Downloaded 77 times

by **Cliquetsy** » Thu Oct 23, 2014 10:26 am

Re: Using Autopano Giga with rendered 360x180 images from Br

by Cliquetsy » Thu Oct 23, 2014 10:26 am

Thanks for the images.
They are pretty distorted, between two pictures the walls don't keep the same dimensions. It's like as if i was trying to stitch screencaps of a virtual tour that was already projected, and the fov was too zoomed out causing the distortions. I don't think even with real photos that would work.
It's basically similar to a parallax issue, I think.

Any way you could improve the fov to minimize the distortions of the walls? How do you place your point of view?
Aaaand otherwise, I've never used 3D software (well i tried DAZ3D once), but I think some have plugins that would allow you to export cube faces, can you do that?

Also, I managed to beat you at the "modern art" part.

by **Cliquetsy** » Thu Oct 23, 2014 10:28 am

Re: Using Autopano Giga with rendered 360x180 images from Br

by Cliquetsy » Thu Oct 23, 2014 10:28 am

PS:
I did get closer to a reasonable result (still bad though) by removing some of the pictures:

by **Panolini** » Thu Oct 23, 2014 10:34 am

Re: Using Autopano Giga with rendered 360x180 images from Br

by Panolini » Thu Oct 23, 2014 10:34 am

Yeah, I know - but I want the walls to give a feeling of a virtual room that equals to about a medium sized meeting room. If I put the walls lower, or further away, I'll loose that effect. Or do you think that it's possible to change this? I haven't found an option to set a specific focal length of the virtual lens in Bryce. It's version 5.5 I'm using.

Great work of art btw!

by **Panolini** » Thu Oct 23, 2014 10:44 am

Re: Using Autopano Giga with rendered 360x180 images from Br

by Panolini » Thu Oct 23, 2014 10:44 am

Using less pictures is a good idea. When using the fisheye (15mm) I normally take 6 pictures in a plane. By using 45 degrees in a square room could make some images look to similar to get Autopano going. By changing that to 6 pictures (60 degree increment), that could possibly improve. I'll try that.

by **Cliquetsy** » Thu Oct 23, 2014 10:47 am

Re: Using Autopano Giga with rendered 360x180 images from Br

by Cliquetsy » Thu Oct 23, 2014 10:47 am

Have a look at this here:
http://www.daz3d.com/forums/viewthread/46278/
They are talking about an older version than what you have, are you sure you can't render your scene as a "cube map" or ... "skycube"? If you can, you'd get 6 square images of your scene, and you could load them in PTP directly.

by **Panolini** » Thu Oct 23, 2014 11:17 am

Re: Using Autopano Giga with rendered 360x180 images from Br

by Panolini » Thu Oct 23, 2014 11:17 am

Thanks for the input. You suggestion made me do a search on the Internet, and I found this:

http://stereopsis.com/cubemap.html

This sounds very promising. Maybe there is a simple solution to all of this!

by **Panolini** » Thu Oct 23, 2014 12:10 pm

Re: Using Autopano Giga with rendered 360x180 images from Br

by Panolini » Thu Oct 23, 2014 12:10 pm

Here's the finished experiment. Thanks for the help "Cliquetsy"

http://www.taiski.no/tmp/bryce/

I will check out further the Bryce animation setup. That would make it much easier to combine real photopanos with brycepanos.

by **Cliquetsy** » Thu Oct 23, 2014 12:12 pm

Re: Using Autopano Giga with rendered 360x180 images from Br

by Cliquetsy » Thu Oct 23, 2014 12:12 pm

Glad it all worked out in the end.

by **DrSlony** » Thu Oct 23, 2014 4:41 pm

Re: Using APG with rendered 360x180 images from Bryce [SOLVE

by DrSlony » Thu Oct 23, 2014 4:41 pm

I haven't used Bryce in years, but many other 3D rendering programs allow directly rendering either an equirectangular image (also called a skybox or skydome) or cubic faces, so you don't need to stitch. Look for such options. Planar cube faces are more space-efficient at storing meaningful 360x180° data than equirectangular images. If Bryce does not have a dedicated button for this, just set your camera to capture a rectilinear projection with a 90° field of view, then rotate it so you get 4 shots round, one up (zenith) and one down (nadir).

by **Panolini** » Fri Oct 31, 2014 8:45 am

Re: Using APG with rendered 360x180 images from Bryce [SOLVE

by Panolini » Fri Oct 31, 2014 8:45 am

Thank you for the tip DrSlony. That is sort of the effect you get if you animate the camera with 6 frames. The correct values are: (x, y, z)

0,0,0
0,90,0
0,-180,0
0,-90,0
-90,0,0
90,0,0

Another important thing is to set the viewangle of the camera to 112.5 degrees, otherwise the cubefaces wont match seamlessly.

If you pan the camera in that order, you can import the cubefaces nicely into Panotour or KRpano and you don't have to rearrange the faces.

In fact, it works so swell - I've upgraded to Bryce 7.1 (20 dollars) and found out that you can do a lot of awesome stuff with it in combination with Panotour.

Firstly; (like you mention) you can import a complete 360x180 panorama from Autopano into Bryce as a Skydome and use it as the backdrop. Than you can place whatever you like in the middle of it and render it together. I found it however difficult to get a good realistic lighting using the Skylab in Bryce when it comes to using indoors panoramas.

The other option is to texture-map the 360x180 panorama from Autopano as a texture to the inside of a Sphere. I found that you can add whatever light you want and get more predictable results with indoor panoramas. Especially when there are lamps and so-on in the scene, you can place the artificial light sources where the light sources are in the photograph and make objects that you render in the scene look more real.

One further aspect that I haven't explored yet, but I believe has huge potential, is the use of the parallax effect in Autopano and rendered objects with the correct lightning and placing. Another bit involves using Photoshop and combining cubefaces from Bryce and Autopano and using parts of both.

If I get the time I will post a more step by step tutorial here to share what I am doing.

by **Panolini** » Fri Oct 31, 2014 10:20 am

Re: Using APG with rendered 360x180 images from Bryce [SOLVE [SOLVED]

by Panolini » Fri Oct 31, 2014 10:20 am

Here's a rundown on how to animate the camera in Bryce 7.1 (same in 5.5) to get the seamless cubefaces.

To make it easier for yourself, you should start with an empty fresh document, but this is not necessary if you want to render something you've already been working on.

When you start with a new document in Bryce you need to set some settings. Click "File"

...and "Document Setup..."

You need a square, so either set the resolution in the "Document Resolution" box, or tick off the "Square" option on the right to get a selection of fixed square resolutions to choose from.

We need 6 frames. The animation alwas starts with "00" so we set the length of the animation to "05" to get 6 frames. Make also sure to select "Frame Count" which makes it easier to adjust the position of the camera later on in the timeline.

Next thing is to show the animation slider with the keyframe editors. If you can't see it, click on the circle in the lower right of the screen to switch between the different bars.

This is how the animation timeline looks like. Notice the + and - buttons on each side of a key.

Next thing is to find the camera. If you can't see it you may have to look for it. You can change what you see in the view mode dialog.

You can move freely in the scene by using the "Director's View". To move around, use the biggest ball with arrows in the main meny to move around to look for the camera

Here you see the camera in the middle of the frame. Select it. (It turns red when it is selected)

You get some options to manipulate the camera. Click on the "A" to change the camera's attributes. (The shortcut for this is ctrl + alt + e. This will come in handy to speed things up.

In the dialog box you need to change the settings for the "Rotate" boxes to 0,0,0. Also make sure you change the FOV to 112.5.

Now you need to add a keyframe for this camerapostion by clicking on the plus sign in the animation editor timeline.

We have our first camera postion. Let's move the slider in the timeline to the next frame by dragging it one marker to the right.

Here the marker is at the next frame.

Open the camera's attributions again by either clicking the "A" next to the camera, or by pressing Ctrl + Alt + E. Change the value for "Y" to 90. Leave everything else as it is.

Add a new keyframe for this camera postion by clicking the plus sign.Do this for all 6 frames. Change values for y from 0 (first frame), 90 to -180 and -90. For the last two images you need to tilt the camera up and down, so set "Y" to 0 for both of them and "X" to 90 for down and -90 for up.

The last thing is to render the frames. Choose "File" and "Render Animation..."

Make sure you change "AVI" to "BMP Images by selecting "Edit" and changing the options.

If you look at the "Start" and "End" values for the animation, Bryce will only render the frames you specify, so make sure to change the values to "00" for start frame and "05" for end frame. (See the error in this screenshot...) ;-)

Good luck!

by **DrSlony** » Fri Oct 31, 2014 10:41 am

Re: Using APG with rendered 360x180 images from Bryce [SOLVE

by DrSlony » Fri Oct 31, 2014 10:41 am

That's nice of you to write a tutorial!

Another thing you could try is to render HDR panoramas and use them as lightmaps - this might solve your problem of poorly matching object lighting in relation to the backdrop pano. Turn color correction off in APG when doing HDR in > HDR out.

by **Destiny** » Mon Nov 03, 2014 9:20 am

Re: Using APG with rendered 360x180 images from Bryce [SOLVE

by Destiny » Mon Nov 03, 2014 9:20 am

I will have to give that a try out... Nice step by steps.. I downloaded Bryce latest version when they were giving it away for free.. Its great software with many options but very slow.. I used it a long time ago for Serialism Art images.. Lots of fun..

Destiny...

by **Artisan S** » Tue Nov 04, 2014 10:03 am

Re: Using APG with rendered 360x180 images from Bryce [SOLVE

by Artisan S » Tue Nov 04, 2014 10:03 am

Bryce is nice indeed.....though these days I rather use Blender. BTW I've done some of this work in Blender and Autopano Pro as well....it worked rather splendid I should say. I set up an array of 64 camera arranged in sphere.....(don't know it should be on one of my harddrives somewhere) and changed camera....now I would probably set up an automised camera flight allong a predetermined path. Then all the virtual pictures were transported into Autopano Pro and after some fiddeling and a faked Papywizard file it all stitched perfectly. But since I own a 3d printer/3d scanner I use my panoheads less and less. And I use the vertical rotor of my panohead as a precise scanning table.....so all my gear is recycled and/or modular (an added bonus that came for free).

Greets, Ed.