July 20, 2009
Extreme and Normal Fisheye

Paul Bourke's work continues to amaze. Here he shows some 360 degree fisheye views.

Extreme Fisheye

A useful note on his "normal" technique:

> I have to photograph the inside of a building and recreate this in a fulldome master so it looks like we are standing inside the building.
> would I be better using something like stitcher to create a cubic image and then compositing this in after effects with a fulldome plugin or is it better to create a spherical stitched panorama and possibly convert this to a circle in photoshop?

In general I prefer spherical panos, generally assembled using AutoPano Pro using either lots of standard camera shots from really high resolution, or 3 fisheye shots. Then I have personal tools to directly create fisheyes from that, but you can equally apply the spherical pano to a sphere in your favourite 3D package and render fisheye views. I'm sure there are lots of other ways also. The Frozen show by Peter Morse used this technique
http://vimeo.com/groups/fulldome/videos/1618365

Tom Casey's approach:

A more straightforward approach would be to use a fisheye lens to get the fulldome circle directly. There is a technical paper on how to do this from a session at the last IPS conference here...

http://www.homerunpictures.com/fulldome/Digital_Image_Capture_for_the_Planetarium.pdf

You might also try doing this as a high dynamic range image, taking the various range of exposures and then combining in Photoshop to get more detail across the interior's brightness range... since interior images tend to be low on contrast.

Matthew Mascheri's suggestions:

Paul and Tom are putting you on the right track. Here are just my two cents on this as well. We shoot 3 fisheyes and stitch them in PTGui. When shooting, shoot in RAW and bracketed for high dynamic range (HDR). This will give you the best look on the dome, as you can combine the exposures, and even tone map to bring out some of the details. You can do this in either PTGui or Photomatix. Once you get your equirectangular image, you can map it to a sphere in your 3D application of choice and render away.

There are some examples of our technique (for both real-time and pre-rendered) on our website http://www.Dome3D.com in the FullSphere™
Gallery.


And a link to other great images.

Flickriver: Most interesting photos tagged with hugin

Posted by Dave at July 20, 2009 10:07 AM