QTVR workflow

[jmottle]

Hey everyone,

I'm working on the workflow to be able to generate a QTVR panoramic tour (with nodes connecting multple panos). The requirements are that the pano must either be cubic or spherical and the final output has to be in an Apple QTVR. I used Christian's (Dschaga) PanoTour and made the modifications suggested to the code to generate a cubic output (6 maps). Then I used the GoCubic app to generate the spherical QTVR but I'm finding that the stitched version is showing stitch lines where the images meet. I created the version below in Photoshop to confirm that is was a problem with the original 6 files, and it seems to be either a vray setting or an issue with PanoTour. Any ideas?

Are there any other workflows to be able to generate this. I will be using VRtoolbox's SceneWorx to generate the final mutli-node output. I've tried the built in MAX Pano Tool and for whatever reason never works properly and always creates poor quality images.

I could use the cubicVR script to render but am not sure the best way to do this so that the Irrandiance map is added to or re-used. I don't want to have to re-render the full IR map for each of the 6 scenes. I'm just starting to use Vray, so I'm still a virgin....

Are there any alternatives?


http://www.cgarchitect.com/test/qtvr_sample.jpg


Thanks,
Jeff Mottle
Smoothe/CGarchitect.com

[Dschaga]

Hi Jeff,

this is an AA issue.
Try to render the panorama in a higher size or ..and this is the better solution, convert the spherical map (the origianl output) to a cubic QTVR with Andrew Jakowleff's panocube: http://www.panoshow.com/panocube.htm

greetings,
chris

[dapeter]

Are you using the Vray camera options?

http://www.spot3d.com/vray/help/VRay...les_camera.htm

Vray advanced can create these images without any need to edit them in an external application. Someone can correct me if I'm wrong, but if you use the "Spherical" camera type, set the FOV to 360, and render it to an image that's twice as wide as it is tall (ie 800x400) the result should be a 360d x 180d sperical mapping. There's also the "box" camera that produces the 360d cross images.

[Dschaga]

the script itself uses the spherical projection, but it could also use the boxcamera... thx for the suggestion.

[jmottle]

Thanks for all the help! So I've done some more testing and using the CubicVR script everything appears to work fine, but I've not done a final render to be able to tell if there will be any issue with the IR map. I'd prefer an option with one render so that there is no room for error.

I tried dapeter's suggestion and rendered a spherical camera and then used the PanoCube software to generate the QTVR, but even with the JPG settings set to 10 the quality is very bad and the perspective is very skewed. I could not figure out where to fix this. Also if you look at the image below you will see the one generated with CubicVR and GoCubic is much clearer than the Spherical render from Vray and PanoCube. The render is fine, it's PanoCube that is messing it up.


http://www.cgarchitect.com/test/compare.jpg


Thanks,
Jeff Mottle
Smoothe/CGarchitect.com

[losbellos]

maybe best way is to use cubic camera and cubic qtVR, that will have the least distorsion, and best quality I think. There is a free script somewhere which does this, gocubic? And there is an exe in that package, use for assemble the images together into cubic qtVR

[Dschaga]

the panotourscript was designed to output webcontent, so the images have a default size of 1024px in Hsize, which is only 256px for each tile of the qtvr. cubicVR uses a different sizing, so the output is sharper.

Change the size of your panoramas to ~3000 - 3500 and you get qtvrs with ~1/2 mb ..a size of 4500 - 6000 will give you highend panoramas and a size of ~1 1/2 mb.

qtvr with 3000px rendersize
qtvr with 1024px rendersize

[jmottle]

Ok that makes total sense about the resolution width. Do you know how you affect camera perspective in a Vray spherical camera vs. the CubicVR script? In the previous example you can see how much more fisheyed the Vray camera is event though they both cover the same area. I'm not quite sure how the actual programs that generate the QTVRs work, so I am only guessing as to why they are behaving differently.

[jmottle]

Actually I think I answered my own question. I did a re-render at 3000 x 1500 and the quality is much better and the FOV is not so fisheyed.

Am I correct in assuming that if you render each side of a cubic VR at 500 x 500 then the final stichted image size would be 2000 wide?

[dbuchhofer]

Hola Jeff

I end up doing the panorama shuffle on occasion, and its generally painful

I do most of them at 3kx1.5k.. this gives you a super clear image at 512 viewing window, and an acceptable one at 640.. couple different ways to do it, for QuicktimeVR we currently use VrPanoWorx.. which is 'ok' the main problem it has is that the quicktimes it creates are cylindrical.. so you end up cropping the 3k x 1.5k image into a 3k x 750 image to get a pano that isn't distorted..

Haven't gotten to the tour side of things yet.. but can't be too far off..
last big one these ones all needed to be about 100-150k to meet the web specs, and panoworx was good at keeping it lively there for such high compressions.. my main beef with it at the time was the lack of automation.. doing 300 panoramas by hand is a beast.

PTViewer is a much nicer way to view them, but some clients and some machines dislike the whole 'Java' thing bah! distortion is a bit high on the sphericals, but thats just the default fov.. easily adjustable in the presenting page.. the HDR pano viewer with auto exposure is especially cool.

couple random thoughts..

[Dschaga]

yep, ptviewer is a more interresting solution for the internet, especialy when you want to connect the panoramas to a tour. The hdri applet is also very nice, but IMHO at the moment not very stabel when you mix hdri-jpgs and normal jpgs...

QTVR is nice but it's to difficult to connect cubic QTVR's with free software ...at the moment i only know about one discontinued sw on apple and the one tutorial on developer.apple.com is something which never worked for me.

[Dynedain]

yeah...we have that "discontinued" software from apple. The took it from 1.0 to 1.1 (free upgrade) but it only works on OS9

Oh, and I haven't found any other way besides this program (and another $300 program) to do QuickTimeVR Objects, where you rotate around the object instead of a panorama.