Any tool to convert 6x1 cube map to Spherical pano??

V-Ray V-Ray Common Off-topic
1

Looking for something that will automatically convert a 6x1 strip into a regular spherical pano.
OR something that can automatically split the 6x1 into individual faces named correctly.

I have a PS action that can split the faces, but then naming is an issue.

I have about 30 odd panos on this project and I dont want to spend hours doing this manually for each update.

krpanotools maketiles tool can also split the faces but then names them 1 - 6

Possibly there is a way to write a bat file that will rename appropriately? Bit out of my skillset..

Any one know of anything?

2

i think there is a droplet action you can run once you have installed krpano… it at least works the other way

3

The Cube to sphere droplet only takes the individual cube faces unfortunately

4

this is what we did for going the opposite direction if its of any help:

1) split left and right in photoshop
2) run through the ‘convert sphere to cube’ krpano droplet (changed settings to spit out JPGs)
3) run through gearshift to combine into the correct order (GearShift for Gear VR)

5

Yeah, was doing something similar going the other way, but found a bunch of photoshop actions that are quite handy Kartaverse Documentation
Seems to be loads of options for going sphere to cube but not the other way… driving me nuts.

I can make a bat file to split the cube strips to individual faces, but the naming is a problem. Im not sure how to get round this.

Cant beleive there isnt a simple bat file or something to simply split a 6x1 jpg into 6 faces, surely Im not the only one!

6

I think you could make a 3ds max scene which uses the cubemap as skybox and render out a Spheral pano.

7

Surely some quality loss in that method?
Also seems to be too much labour involved in that, this needs to be automated. Manually processing a pile of panos every day is way too time consuming.

8

I dont know, but I can imagine that vrays sampling is better than krpano’s.
I’m not a script guy so I dont know how that could be automated. But I think It’s possible to let max automatically change the input image and output names via maxscript.
Or possibly somehow use vray standalone for this?

9

Well if anyone needs this in the future, some hardcore googling helped me write this no doubt clumsy bat file. But it does the job.
Needs krpano and imagemagick.
Think the bat file needs to be in the krpano folder as well to access the “maketiles” command.

Takes the cube strip, splits the faces (based on being 1536 square)
Flips the faces the right way
Renames the right direction.

You can then drop the faces on the krpano cube to sphere tool to get the spherical pano out of it.


mkdir "\\%~p1faces\"

set filepath=\\%~p1faces\

"%~dp0KRPANOTOOLS64.exe" maketiles %* "%filepath%\%~n1_split%%h.jpg" 1536

"C:\Program Files\ImageMagick-7.0.2-Q16\magick.exe" mogrify -flop "%filepath%\%~n1_split1.jpg"
"C:\Program Files\ImageMagick-7.0.2-Q16\magick.exe" mogrify -flop "%filepath%\%~n1_split2.jpg"
"C:\Program Files\ImageMagick-7.0.2-Q16\magick.exe" mogrify -flip "%filepath%\%~n1_split3.jpg"
"C:\Program Files\ImageMagick-7.0.2-Q16\magick.exe" mogrify -flip "%filepath%\%~n1_split4.jpg"
"C:\Program Files\ImageMagick-7.0.2-Q16\magick.exe" mogrify -flop "%filepath%\%~n1_split5.jpg"
"C:\Program Files\ImageMagick-7.0.2-Q16\magick.exe" mogrify -flop "%filepath%\%~n1_split6.jpg"

ren "%filepath%\%~n1_split1.jpg" "%~n1_r.jpg"
ren "%filepath%\%~n1_split2.jpg" "%~n1_l.jpg"
ren "%filepath%\%~n1_split3.jpg" "%~n1_u.jpg"
ren "%filepath%\%~n1_split4.jpg" "%~n1_d.jpg"
ren "%filepath%\%~n1_split5.jpg" "%~n1_b.jpg"
ren "%filepath%\%~n1_split6.jpg" "%~n1_f.jpg"

echo.
pause
10

If anyone knows how to give this functionality so I can drag and drop more than file at a time on to it, would be amazing.

11

Hi AlexP! I just replied again in the thread I started:

http://forums.chaosgroup.com/showthread.php?89668-Stereoscopic-Cube6x1-why-the-odd-mirrored-output

The bottom line with KRPANO is that if you are creating for stereoscopic VR then cubemap images you create yourself and MANUALLY put into the left and right pano folders is the only way to go. Spherical is just not good enough quality - even for desktop viewing. There is simply not an effective translator offered by KRPANO anyway. Besides, since V-Ray is already spitting out a cubemap strip why not just use it?

12

Can you explain what you mean here?

13

So here’s a couple of screen grabs. The first shows all of my left and right scene pano folders for a current project. There’s 10 scenes in all.

The 2nd grab shows the guts of the pano_l.tiles folder. Which has 6 cube squares, a preview strip, and a thumbnail. When I first started using KRPANO I took a look at one of their example folders and they had structured it in this way. I simply replaced all of their low res images with my own. In the latest version they’ve added a separate folder for mobile VR images. These are a the SAME images as in the main folder.

The translator droplets are a complete nightmare for anyone who is generating V-Ray based panos / 3D VRs. Don’t use them. I could go into all kinds of reasons but the point is that there’s nothing better than your own cube face images.

Also, I keep my preview strip as white. The preview strip is typically low resolution and is what you see as things are ‘loading’. It’s ugly…so white is better for me. haha.

The thumbnail is 240x240. It doesn’t need to be any bigger than that.

Hope this makes sense!

1.JPG
1.JPG513×486 46.4 KB

2.JPG
2.JPG1017×192 22.2 KB

14

I see, are you using the droplets to create the initial folder/XML before replacing?

15

Yes indeed. Just the VTOUR normal droplet.

16

I tried the bat and it didn’t work for me :(…any ideas what I need to make this work? Splitting, flipping and renaming these faces manually is sooo tedious.. It takes all the fun out of VR.

krpano.JPG
krpano.JPG976×512 89.2 KB

17

sorry you need imagemagick for the flipping etc
http://www.imagemagick.org/script/index.php

also change .jpg to .tif in the bat file

Ive since found that when krpano splits the tiles to jpg the compression is pretty horrible

18

This is where my amateur bat writing skills become apparent.

But it looks like on your it’s adding an additional slash to the path at the beginning? so \\\Krpano instead of \\Krpano ??? maybe?

You may not need those extra slashes at the start of the bat, I was processing files from a network location.. hmm

19

I see…I have zero writing skills what’s so ever so this is way beyond me. I will give that a shot.

thanks for the quick reply. :slight_smile:

20

My tool to convert cubemaps to panoramic tour in one click is nearly finished.
It will be released in few days or a week or two.

If you wish to try it our sooner, just send me a PM :slight_smile: