How does one render a still image to replace a 120 degree pan?

V-Ray V-Ray for 3ds Max V-Ray for 3ds Max :: General
1

Hi,
i need some advise here. I am doing several interior shots of a mall and some of my shots are basically a camera panning across a couple of atriums. I have animated a camera and have sent out the sequences, where each frame takes around 15 minutes.

My question here is how do i replicate that in post by just rendering one large file and panning through the image in post?

the camera in question is a vray cam (still) : film gate=36, focal length=24, zoom=1, f=8, distortion=0, type=quadratic.
the frame size is 720x480, i could easilly render a 15000x480 frame and do it in post, but the image gets squeezed and i loose out in the height of the image.

is there a way to render the extended image, without actually loosing out on the “frame composition”

i hope i have been able to explain the problem.
Thanks
Vivek

2

Just make a panorama. Either splice your frames together with CS3 photo merge, or render a spherical panorama. For the spherical panorama, just replace your camera with a regular max cam, and in vray camera rolllout, set the camera type to spherical, and change the FOV to 360, and render at 2:1 proportion. I usually do them at 4000x2000px. Then open the rendering in something like Pano2qtvr, and limit the range of motion to 120 degress, and save as a QTVR file.

3

Thanks Clifton,
any way of doing this with the Vray cam…dont want to loose and re-work the lighting.
Vivek

4

In that case, just use your animated frames, and stitch into a panorama.

5

I guess…i wasnt very clear…i dont want to render 750 frames at 20 minutes a frame to cover a 120 degree camera pan across a scene.
Just want to be able to keep the height fixed and render a really long image that i can pan over in premiere.

6

Yes, that’s why I suggested a panorama. Just render enough frames from the sequence so that the geometry overlaps, like every 75th frame, open them in photoshop CS3, go to File:Automate:Photomerge, and specify open files. It will take them all and stitch them seamlessly into a long panorama you can then pan over in premiere.

Or you could experiment with cylindrical panormas with 120 degree HFOV, but you would have to switch your camera to a max camera.

7

Thanks…i’ll try the Hfov mode and re-work the color mapping

8

If you use the vray cam to make the panorama images be sure to uncheck “vignetting” to avoid the dark edges. photoshop could probably compensate for it but your best off avoiding it all together.

9

I ran into this same issue and found this script

Its an old one but still works. You may have to adjust the zoom a small bit to get the exact match but it is very very close. Basically you tell it the focal length and current size and then tell it the final output size and it gives you what the focal length would need to be. However there will be a bit of distortion involved if you get things that are very close to the camera.

10

Vlado et al:

Any chance of panoramic/spherical/cylindrical physcams in coming builds? I like having exposure control but miss making panoramas in one shot…

11

It is not impossible, but I’m trying to figure out a good way to do this. I suppose a modifier for a regular 3ds Max camera might do the trick.

Best regards,
Vlado

12

The modifier is an interesting proposition. Another thing I miss (and I bet I’m not alone) is simply rendering a perspective view. I have an extra PhysCam that I move around with Walkthrough and that works pretty well.

While experimenting, (this is total blasphemy) I actually tried rendering a Max camera using exposure control. Logarithmic actually came very close to getting good results on the interior shots I’m working on. But not all the way and I don’t have time right now to experiment further.

Maybe exposure controls in the Camera rollout in the render dialog? Turn them on for standard cameras, off to let the physical cameras do their thing.

13

I second this request…would be a boon to be able to render out panoramic views without re-working out the lighting or exposures

14

You could render “slices” and stitch them together with panotools.

15

yes, i can render slices and put them together with all kinds of tools. But try doing that in a scene with moving people.

16

My genius manager just suggested using the standard camera anyway and correcting the exposure in post. We render to exr, so this should work, right?

Set up the scene as I want with VRay Sun/Cam render to my liking.

Place a standard cam, render with whatever pano settings I want and correct in AE.

I’ll let you all know how it turns out. I’ll post images if I can get permission.

17

following on from this, if you wanted a 360 pan left to right, no verticals (and again, not a QTVR but done in AFX or similar) would the best way be to render out a series of images, say 8 frames across the timeline and then just stitch with Photoshop?

We’ve been messing around with the spherical camera but it’s not what we are after in this instance.

Any advice much appreciated.

Thanks

18

You may find better results with the Cylindrical option in the VRay tab, Camera rollout. Just make your render dimensions appropriately proportioned and see what that brings you. What are your specific problems with the spherical image you are getting? Why no verticals?

The problem I was faced with was that I had moving people in the scene. I was not interested in trying to stitch animations together along with the backgrounds.

As it happened I rendered very wide angle shots from a PhysCam and it worked out well for our project.

The bigger issue for us was HD. We were to make a presentation on a 52in Plasma with people standing right close to it. we wanted as much detail and clarity as we could get. There was no way we could render 5 minutes (9000 frames) of HD images. It would have taken weeks on our farm and we have other projects running concurrently. As it was the frame times were 3-4hours for 4000x1080. But I only rendered about 30 images for the final. The people were silhouettes only and rendered in scanline, white against black for comping in AE.

19

thanks.
It’s not problems with the spherical cam option, just this isn’t what we are after in this instance.
A client has requested a full 360 rotation, but as one long flat image.
We are looking at different technique for how to achieve this.

The more I think about it it’s basically like setting up a pan & tile environment in Nuke, so the best options would probably be 8 renders at 45 degree increments and stitched together…

20

http://www.digitalartform.com/archives/2004/11/nodal\_point\_pan\_2.html