Match Fisheye lens

[glorybound]

I have this crazy photo to match, but I can't inside of MAX. What to do?

[glorybound]

I found the distortion for the V-Ray camera, which is awesome, but how do I see the background? I know how to see it in MAX, but I can't use MAX's environment and V-Ray's distortion. I spent an hour slowly moving the building into its place, but it was simply a guessing game.

[squintnic]

dont think thats a fisheye. more like a stitched panorama?

[stef.thomas]

As Nic suggests, it's more probably a cylindrical panorama. It can be done, but it's a bit of a tricky workaround.

First you need to be using standard max camera, then override the FOV with your vray settings. Work out the angle of view in the photograph. You can use the following formula: (Pixel width of stitched panorama x FOV of lens used) / Pixel width of single image (from EXIF data) = Panoramic FOV. This value is what you input in the override FOV box. Set type to Warped Spherical (Old-style).

You won't see any change in viewport, but you can now use VrayRT to try and align your shot. The more info you have on camera position, height etc. plus any modeled roads or buildings, the easier this part will be.

This is a WIP of one I did a couple of years ago for a visual impact assessment using this method, where I had topographical data to help:

[glorybound]

Way more than I planed. Here is another photo, which seems to be equally odd to match.

[DPS]

A few more ideas...

You could render out a smaller portion of your pano. Perhaps 90degrees. Work with this, and then integrate this back into your full spherical pano.

So your render would be square and essentially one tile from a cubic panoramic projection.

If I needed to be accurate (if my cg objects needed accurate alignment with my back plate) then I would use pano2vr to convert the pano first to a cubic projection. Then just use one tile as my backplate in max. Note Max's built in panorama exporter produces cubic maps and then converts then to spherical.

You could render these tiles manually if you like - front back, L, R, T, B by simply rotating your camera. But you'd need to figure out how to convert back to spherical projection at the end. Hence why I use pano2vr as it handles this easily.

[DPS]

Re that last image - to me it looks like it's super wide angle and probably rendered out from a panorama. That's why it looks a bit unusual. Where is your CG stuff being integrated into the photo?

[glorybound]

I am trying to align, using the photo as a view port background.

[stef.thomas]

Again, this may be a composite panorama of several vertical shots stitched together. Either use the method I described above or else map the photo to a plane with bend modifier to form partial cylinder that fills your viewport. That should be a simpler way to straighten out distortion in the backplate.

[DPS]

Sorry my bad - on first glance I thought that first image a sphere.