Creating virtual 360 Panorama, part 1
Everybody knows how important the visualization and its role is in presentation of the design to the end user with nice photorealistic images. How is easy the understanding between the client and the designer when there are no need in explaining and thinking over drawings, plans, sketches, elevations and other raw technical information... But what if just the series of static images is not enough? What if the client wants a greater sense of presence and volume than the 2d bitmap images, while doing the animation is impractical because of the significant time and computational costs? The answer to this rhetorical and quite topical question is the pseudo three-dimensional representation of 2d images using 3d interactive panoramas technology. Such a presentation will let us see a three-dimensional picture of the visualization using the virtual camera, turn it and watch for any point around the full 360 degrees, as well as zoom in and out.
PANORAMA
(Click on the image and rotate it in any direction while holding the left mouse button)
In fact, at first glance an interactive panorama consists of a three-dimensional cube, which has a stretched texture over the each side with a specific distortion (the projection of the sphere to a cube), and inside the cube is a virtual camera from which the panorama is observed.
The textures are stretched over the cube so, that seams on its corners are not visible and the illusion of the integrity of the image is created. But actually this image consists of six separate conjugating pictures, the one per each cube face. The pictures on the faces of the cube, in turn, cover all 360 degrees from the point of view. All the front, right, rear, left, up and down sides. The only feature on which we should pay attention to is the fact that the pictures, stretched over the faces of a virtual cube, should not be just flat shots of the six sides from the point of view. They must be the projections of the sphere on the cubes faces, with a sphere diameter equal to the diagonal of the cube, causing these images have the corresponding distortion.
The whole process of creating a 3d panorama is to make these conjugating texture images. Then to stitch them to the image of a special format, the so-called cubic projection.
When the cubic projection is ready, we need to stretch it over the 3d-cube and turn it to an interactive panorama using highly specialized software.
Jen
Nico
Leno
Stue
RenderStuff
Note that the Panorama Exporter is a integrated base 3ds Max function and it initially designed for work with the standard 3ds Max camera only and can't work with VRayPhysicalCamera. Thus, it doesn't positively differ from the way described in the tutorial for creating virtual 360 panoramas.
But the Panorama Exporter way has a list of disadvantages because of it's process of work, at which it renders six sides (font, right, back, left, bottom, top) views and automatically stitches them to a spherical (equirectangular) projection after that.
Firstly, this like process makes the correction of the rendering very hard. For example when you want to re-render some region of the image using the function of region rendering of the closest bucket found to the mouse pointer (with mouse in a V-Ray frame buffer). So, if you need to re-render something little, you can't just use this tool and you will have to wait until all the sides are rendered and stitched together. In the result the making local corrections becomes insufferable.
Secondly, this way makes impossible the creating and saving to a HDD the panoramic GI maps (light cache, Irradiance map) for their further using by loading from file, what especially actual when making the panoramas of a very high resolution. The calculation of those takes many hours even using distributed rendering technology with a multiple computers.
Thirdly, 3ds Max Panorama Exporter utility creates very blurred and poor equirectangular projections and thus they can be used as a rough preview only.
Stue, we advice you and everyone not to use the 3ds Max Panorama Exporter utility. Use the technology described in a tutorial that has not the above-listed flaws and you will have great interactive renderings ;)
Stue
zero
zero
RenderStuff
There were some issues with a QuickTime Player on the Windows 64-bit platforms, but they were fixed in the latest versions of player. Try to download the latest one from the Apple's site and install it:
http://www.apple.com/quicktime/player/
Just in case there is a just working mov-version of panorama, which we've created for the tutorial:
interior-interactive-360-panorama-example.mov (3,7 Mb)
You can run it and check if the panorama mov-files can be opened with your player. Hope it will be useful for you.
If you will have any questions, please write. We'll look into them together ;)
zero
Vasco
I've been doing this before with just the panorama exporter and I'd love to try this method instead, but is there anyway of doing the camera trick without V-Ray? I currently only use mental ray.
RenderStuff
This is done very easily in Mental Ray. For render the 360 panoramic image you need to use the specialized MR camera lens shader. It is called WrapAround (lume). Go to Render tab of the Render Scene (F10) dialog, find the Camera Shaders group in Camera Effects rollout and set the WrapAround (lume) shader in the Lens slot. Just click the button that says none and pick the very bottom shader in the opened list.
Also do not forget to set Image Aspect to 2:1 ;)
Vasco
peprgb
One question, how do you manage the quality of final .mov? i put to High and insert 1800px image but the result is blurred......
Regards
RenderStuff
For example, the panorama for this lesson was rendered in the resolution of 6000x3000 pixels.
For the subjective assessment of what resolution is necessary to obtain a clear panorama, you should be guided by the rule the more the better :) If time allows, the 8000x4000 px will not be excess. Of course, if it is a panorama as the final product, and not as a preview for approval or the choosing the rendering camera angles.
If we take the viewing angle of the standard aspect ratio of 4:3 frame as 120 degrees, then after working with formulas :) it turns out that if you multiply the less side of the proposed frame by 1.41, you get a less side of the panorama. That is, in theory, if we want to get the same quality on the panorama, as well as on the frame 800 by 600 pixels, the smaller side of 600 pixels should be multiplied by 1,41. We get 846 pixels. This is the shorter side of the desired panorama. It is easy to guess that the full panorama resolution is 1692 by 846 pixels in this case.
Unfortunately, in practice, when converting an equidistant projection with specific distortions in the cubic map the quality is lost. To make the picture beautiful it should be rendered at higher resolution. The easiest way is to multiply bigger side of the frame by 3 and get a bigger side of the panorama. In this example, with the frame 800 by 600 pixels, the good quality rendering resolution is 2400 by 1200 pixels.
Fell free to rely on your own subjective opinion. If you think it is better to make bigger resolution - make it bigger, or vice versa, if you think that this is just take extra time rendering - reduce it. In the rendering process the lot of things are subjective, this is one of them ;)
peprgb
Best regards,
modeler101
firoz
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ashley
2010-05-25 22:05:26