Environment Map Experimentation

[Frutiger]

Hey Guys,
I'm doing a deep dive on environment maps and I've finally made some decent progress. I thought I'd share it with you fellas incase you find this stuff interesting.

Here's the goal: I want to be able to walk out onto a future building site and shoot the panoramic photos for an EXR from the exact position the render will be taken from and then see how the render ends up looking like. Theoretically, it should map out the surrounding landscape and all site features accurately as long as everything is aligned correctly.

The first step is getting equipment. I'm using a Nikon D300, Nikon 10.5mm fisheye lens and a Manfrotto 303SPH tripod head. For software, I'm using Autopano Giga to do pretty much everything. Then of course, I'm going Skindigo --> Indigo for the final render.

Here's a successfully stitched and rendered EXR of my office that used a very straightforward workflow. All steps were automated. There was no step that involved writing some sort of custom script or manually changing each file. I would consider this to be a commercially viable workflow, requiring no labor of love to make it functional.

This particular EXR is incomplete, as I only took one row of photos at 20 degree intervals, but demonstrates the competence of the blending and matching.

You have no idea how happy I was when this actually worked.

If there's sufficient interest I'll post a more detailed tutorial on all that later. For now I'll focus on the windup to what I'm trying to make work now.

Here's a dropbox link to the .exr (80MB) from that render just incase you're into that kinda stuff. And also, here's a low-rez LDR preview:

Not perfect, but not bad!

In a few hours I'm going to head out to the jobsite to shoot the photos for a more sophisticated render that meshes in the proposed building and landscape. I'll keep you guys up to date on how it's going. Wish me luck!

[OnoSendai]

Wow, cool stuff!
You may be pleased to know that the next version of Indigo will load and process EXRs much faster (something like 10x faster)

[Pibuz]

Sorry frutiger: I hardy understand what's your aim..

You want to build up your own EXR of an outdoor environment to be able to use that EXR in the visualization of the project you'll realize on that site?

[Frutiger]

Yes, but more specifically, I'm going to go out to a site before construction has begun and create an environment map from the exact position that the render is going to be. So if I model the site correctly and rotate the Env Map into the right place, it'll allow me to create some renders that show off the view from the proposed building.

It's going to be tricky making sure that some trees aren't in the way, but it'll be a good experiment.

Did that make more sense?

[Pibuz]

Yes ok: now I get it. Thanks.

[cotty]

I'll keep you guys up to date on how it's going. Wish me luck!

Thank you for sharing and good luck!

[Whaat]

I'm definitely interested in your process. Please keep this thread updated with your progress. I'm not sure what you mean by 'the entire process was automated'. Care to explain?

[Frutiger]

I'm not sure what you mean by 'the entire process was automated'. Care to explain?

Good question, a little context might help.

I've found that with panorama stitching software there inevitably comes a step where you have to manually convert all your files, or organize them, or manually add control points, manually stack them by exposure, etc. It gets to be frustrating and time consuming. Autopano automates the process without too much fussing and allows you to que up multiple files for stitching and blending, making it all relatively painless.

The first few times I tried to figure out HDR panorama stitching I ended up reading SIGGRAPH papers. This software allows you to bypass that whole mess.

[Bosseye]

Thats all very cool - I'm interested to see how you get on.

[wojtek-w]

Thats all very cool - I'm interested to see how you get on.

+1 !!!

[Frutiger]

Here's some early results. I'd say this may turn out to be a workable method. I'll post up more specific steps later. This is just to show how it's going so far.

Here's a quick test of one of EXRs just to make sure it's working. I took five "camera" positions while I was at this site, this is the first of five.

Test of EXR

Alignment of the ENV map and model is a bit of a pain. The only method is guess and check, so there's alot of back and forth. It's worth noting that it's important you record the camera position while on the site. You'll need to place the sketchup camera in the exact same spot as where you were really standing on the site. That leaves rotation, which is where the guess and check comes into play.


Anyways, you end up with something that looks like this:

almost aligned!

Which is starting to look like something we can use. It's got the view correctly projected behind the proposed building. The building on the far left is an existing building and that's just a rough model of it. It was very useful for aligning the environment map.

The final step will probably be to merge it with a "sketch overlay" like this image:

Clients love this stuff.

I think photoreal is feasible, but it's not the goal for this presentation. We're shooting for an image like this, but with more site context:

Old Work

More modeling and texturing is going to be the next step. I'm going to try to cover up "bad projections" like that tree that's looming on the far left. The more photoreal model detail the better, but there's always an easy way out with this method: I can always just cover it up with the sketch overlay in the composite.

Enough of this jibba jabba, time to get back to work.

[StompinTom]

Really cool technique and exciting to see how you develop it! Looks very useful.