Photomatching to panorama

[duke2]

This is a real pain in the ass. I often take several photos and have Photoshop stitch them together to get me a good wide shot of a site, however, matching this in VRay is often nigh-impossible. Attached is the photo in question. Anyone have any tips?

[duke2]

Note that i've go the camera in the right location, with the right focal length. I've got the terrain done according to the contours and an image of the cad plane of the site onto that so I can line it up with the photo (which is projected onto the terrain in screenspace, at 50% opacity).

[ipo]

It is sometimes easier and quicker to rebuild environment with part of photography in photoshop than to try to insert a model in the right place in max, however you use vray or other renderer.
If you even want to insert in a photo, you may try to put your model in 1 ou 2 photos maxi, to avoid defrmations a vraycam can't reproduce.

[super gnu]

id suggest aligning to a single photo, then manually stitching in the pictures either side, leaving the "core" photo relatively undeformed. thats how we used to do it in the good old days. however obviously its a crapload of work and not much help if your building spans multiple photos.

another alternative, if you can get proper surveyed data and a nice accurate alignment, is to do your renders perfectly aligned to each photo, drop each on top of its respective photo, then get photoshop to stitch after. this aint much use if you have a load of render layers though.


the final, and best option, is to get a really damn good camera (beg/borrow/steal) with a nice wide lens, and do it in one photo. then crop off the top and bottom to get the panoramic look. that way your vray camera should be able to match it.

as youve found, there isnt really a way to get vray to align to a stitched image.. the distortion just isnt natural. having said that, i suspect there could be a way to use the "distortion map" feature in the physcam.. however how to generate the distortion map in the first place...?

[stef.thomas]

I've had good results using Vray RT to do this. You need to use a standard max camera, then go to the camera rollout in render setup. Change camera type to Warped Spherical (old-style) and override the FOV to what is present in your photo. You will need to calculate this based on the particular camera that took the background photo and the pixel width of the panorama. When you enable the RT viewport you will see the camera distortion allowing you to match to the background image.

[mcnamex]

i've gotten pretty good result using matching soft like syntheyes or pftrack. certainly help alot to know all the correct real life data to match to.

[super gnu]

dont syntheyes and pftrack only work on video?

also i think the issue here is since the background has been stitched in photoshop, there is no "real life data" to match to...

[joconnell]

There's a lens match function in syntheyes where you draw lines over the image that you think align to the x, y and z axis and it'll make a camera which matches those lines of perspective. Works quite well and I think there might be a similar function in google sketch which is a free option!

[super gnu]

oww cool! i didnt know that

[duke2]

Yeah I know about that one, but it (the sketchup one atleast) doesn't do distortion - it won't do panoramas.

[duke2]

Thanks stef.thomas. I've been doing just what you said with VrayRT. I chose two constants for reference - the curb in the photo, and my modelled curb (because the terrain is accurate). The result isnt perfect but here it is (red is model, green is photo):