I've been working on making some spherical panorama renders, using Vue, for use in Bagginsbill's Environment Sphere, within Poser.

Here's an example of one that just finished rendering (click to see the large version in my gallery):

I'm planning some more involved landscape scenes, featuring forests. mountains, etc, as well as some further, more straight-forward compositions, with a simple ground plane (desert or sea, etc) like this one.

Just had a couple of questions...

1. What kind of resolution is most desireable for this purpose? I'm rendering out tests at 4000 pixels wide currently. Would a higher resolution be better?

2. Am I best to produce these in high dynamic range (.hdr) format?

Cheers

;-)

This is cool.

10000

Yes

looking forward to them. Look great.

Thanks Bagginsbill

Cool... I will try for a 10000 pixel wide render next then and see how the render time works out.

Saving as hdr instead of jpeg is then trivial to do...

;-)

Are you going to offer these for sale?

To start off, I was thinking of putting together a collection of my best renders, in hdr format, as a downloadable freebie... in due course.

I'll post the results I get in my gallery anyway, in jpeg format, at 4000 pixels wide, as I go. If anyone wishes to use these versions in their renders just now, they are most welcome.

But the hdr versions would exceed the gallery limits and need to be shared in a downloadable zip format. I would maybe put them together as a collection of Poser material files and set it up so that Poser could import that via the content room?

I guess if I was distributing these, for use with BB's envsphere, then I'd like to do that in a beginner-friendly manner.

I'll investigate this further I guess, once I have some more renders done ;-)

Quote - Worked fine for me...

Very nice ;-)

Just curious: would you be willing to post a screenshot of your render settings? I think I've been doing it wrong and getting:

...which really isn't all that usable in Poser and BB's sphere. I used settings that were suggested to me, but I must have misunderstood something.

Offered as freebies is very appealing.  Have you considered rendering alien landscape or fantasy versions?

Hi Robynsveil

Attached above (hopefully) are my Vue render options, that I'm about to render with.

I've upped the dimensions to 10K pixels. Otherwise, apart from that I can't see anything different in your render settings. I'm using Vue 10 Esprit in fact, so one base version down from you... although I've ended up added some more modules to that now.

4000 pixels wide took about half a day I think... so will see what 10000 takes ;-)

Oh! Half a day. Well, sheesh, impatient me. I guess it's just the nature of the beast. I thought something wasn't right with my system.
I've been saving to both jpg and hdr when i finish rendering, just 'cuz.

Thanks for that, MonkeyCloud... that really helped.

Quote - Offered as freebies is very appealing.  Have you considered rendering alien landscape or fantasy versions?

Yes, definitely... personally I am into a lot of retro sci fi stuff, as found in the likes of "Fantastic Stories" periodicals et al.

This book is a major resource for me in terms of that:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/0450027724

In terms of Fantasy... well, I'm a big Rodney Matthews fan. Would that sort of thing be in order on that front perhaps?

Both these genres may need to wait till I've saved up and added the Botanicals module to my Vue stack though... so I can try and make up some alien / fantasy plant life, in the style of JC (James Cameron). LOL. 

Or maybe just accrued a bit more ready-made Vue content in those genres...

But sounds like a good ultimate aim ;-)

Quote - Oh! Half a day. Well, sheesh, impatient me. I guess it's just the nature of the beast. I thought something wasn't right with my system.
I've been saving to both jpg and hdr when i finish rendering, just 'cuz.

Thanks for that, MonkeyCloud... that really helped.

He he... yeah definitely a waiting game. Its rendering the whole 360 degree environment I guess. Although also, I think the displaced ocean surface probably didn't help in that last one ;-)

Anyway, I figured this would be something for Eddie (my imac) to do, whilst I was at work...

Ah, one other thing. I'm not enabling gamma correction on these currently.

That'd be right wouldnt it? On the basis that, if gamma correction is desired, then it can be added within Poser...

In fact, this gc question probably makes no odds / doesn't apply to the hdr versions anyway???

10000 pixels wide takes a wee bit longer to render. LOL. Eddie could have his work cut out ;-)

hi Monkeycloud,

questions:

1. can P8 / P9 do HDR? I thought not, so it might make sense to make a JPG / PNG package as well for those users

2. can you include a little scheme of your Vue approach and settings? This way more people can contribute to the collection while all those adhere to some standard (which is the one you set). As I'm happy to contribute as well, but I just don't have the time right now.

and indeed: please don't GC them in Vue!!

Thanks in advance, happy rendering, this will teach Eddie a lesson :)

1) can P8 / P9 do HDR? I thought not, so it might make sense to make a JPG / PNG package as well for those users

yes they do, it's also in Poser 7. ***

okee, thanks. I couldn't check myself since my new machine only has the Pro's installed (at the moment).

Thanks for the hdr clarification guys.

Once I've worked out a good technique I will share it.

That first one was relatively straight forward... with just a flat sea plane.

Once introducing landscape, there a few more issues like, e.g. how high should the camera be, cropping up... (technically that question applies to the sea plane too of course)

...on that point, how high should the camera be, ideally, do folk reckon??

;-)

I'd love to see one at about 15,000 ft, with fields or a coast line below..... (for a WW2 Battle of Britain pic I was working on that stalled out due to no suitable dome material...)

Quote - I'd love to see one at about 15,000 ft, with fields or a coast line below..... (for a WW2 Battle of Britain pic I was working on that stalled out due to no suitable dome material...)

 

Good idea Khai-J-Bach... I'll definitely give that a shot.

I'm in the process of trying to design some landscape at the moment. I'll need to expand it I think for an aerial shot... I'm working on a 50 square kilometre patch at present.

That's in terms of what is actually shaped landscape. I'm setting up an infinite plane beyond this... either of water, or just flat ground.

What about the camera placement for use in a ground level Poser scene with figures in it?

I'm thinking a camera at a height of between 2 metres and maybe 10 metres... e.g. perhaps a camera at the 6 metre mean height in that range... would give the most scope for adjusting the Poser camera to shoot figures from both slightly below and slightly above, without the envsphere backdrop looking somehow distorted?

But maybe it's not as fine as that even...

How much leeway is there in that respect, when using a spherical panoramic image like this... in terms of the Poser camera position's deviation from the spherical panorama's nodal / centre point??

A reasonable amount I guess?

For just sky, you can get away with a large amount of camera disagreement or movement within the sphere.

The trouble is when you try to point the camera down. For example, trying to place a car on the "ground" - it just doesn't look right if you deviate much at all in camera viewpoint, unless the ground is wide open.

I get away with it in Doge's Palace, as this is open courtyard and there's nothing nearby but pavement. But the Doge's Palace image is so low in resolution that it's only suitable for demonstrations - not for a published work.

The original photo had the camera somewhere between 60 and 70 inches above ground.

The parallax disparity created by this situation is mild when you look at the buildings and sky, but rather severe with regard to the ground.

Quote - For just sky, you can get away with a large amount of camera disagreement or movement within the sphere.

The trouble is when you try to point the camera down. For example, trying to place a car on the "ground" - it just doesn't look right if you deviate much at all in camera viewpoint, unless the ground is wide open.

I get away with it in Doge's Palace, as this is open courtyard and there's nothing nearby but pavement. But the Doge's Palace image is so low in resolution that it's only suitable for demonstrations - not for a published work.

Thanks Bagginsbill... I kind of suspected this.

That issue wouldn't be there, I don't think, for a shot like Khai-J-Bach suggests... where the ground would be in the distance, down the way.

But for shot where, say there is a car or people on the ground and the camera is looking down at them, its best I guess to have a prop / set...such as your Car Patio ;-) ...providing the Poser ground... and employing some sort of trickery (e.g. a wall or balustrade or brow of a hill) to blend the extremity of that with the ground that recedes off to the horizon, as portrayed by the spherical panorama image...?

For example in Santel's image earlier in this thread, using my first test render, I presume he's used a ground plane prop with a water shader in the foreground, under the boat...? ...and that manages to blend into the sea from my Vue render.

So, I guess my concern is more how much camera position leeway there is, assuming that the foreground ground in Poser will be some sort of blended prop...

We x-posted. Yes for an aerial, nothing is close and you can move and rotate the camera a lot.

The fiction that the ground is 68 inches away is the problem. In my sphere it is actually 750 feet away.

Someone once suggested (asked) something I'm pondering.

Is there a UV mapping trick I can do to use a flat bottom on the envsphere? It would be a true hemisphere for the sky, and a true flat object for the ground.

Been thinking about that math for a while.

Speaking of alternative mappings - there's no reason we need super high resolution for the whole sphere.

There are at least two approaches I can think of to better make use of space and time.

Both involve having higher resolution for the part the camera can see directly, and lower resolution for the rest.

1. Use two maps - one that is the full 360 by 180 (lighting and reflections), the other that is perhaps only 120 by 60 (background). Both can still be equirectangular format. I would set up a double image shader that overlays one on the other. I see from screen shots that in View you can render any subsection at will. So you could do the full image at 4K x 2K, and the concentrated background also at 4K by 2K, but the background would look like 12K x 6K. It would have the same appearance but 1/9th the space (and time to render it).

2. Use a single map that has a new mapping that isn't homogeneous. There are many possibilities for this mapping, but the construction of it might require a new tool. I can build a decoder for it in Poser nodes. The resulting image could probably be smaller than option 1 but still have the same information as option 1. Option 1 has redundant info - the full sphere is reproducing the partial image.

RV - your curvy horizon is the result of having the camera tilted.

IMHO, for each HDR result it should be clearly documented how high the camera was above the ground when the render was made. Because the cam position becomes the center of the Environment Sphere, and the Poser ground level should be that amount below the center when the scene is build (by lowering the floor or raising the Sphere, whatever).

@BB: can the (Diffuse) ProbeLight node be of help? It maps the environmental HDR onto an object. Not investigated further, but might be an idea. We "only" need to map the bottom x% of the image, or so.

For the mapping math: the mapping of a portion of the botton half of the hemisphere onto a (circular) groundplane depends on the distance of the center of the hemisphere to the center of the ground plane, relative to the radius of the hemisphere of course. Not very complex, but every distance brings a different mapping which might make it an issue to implement.

RV: Camera's should be straight forward, please. Horizon, ground level, etc should be straight horizontals.

Thanks Bagginsbill - yes, crossposted there.

I'd also been thinking along the lines of how to reduce the need to render the whole thing at that massive resolution.

For a ground level camera, the sky will always be distant.

I was thinking that for the sky, which is all pretty distant, in that style of image, rendering out at 4000px by 2000px would be plenty. Less than that may be plenty...

Rather than necessarily doing anything with UV maps I could always then blow that up to 10000px by 5000px in Photoshop and composite it with higher res foreground ground elements or whatever. Photoshops resampling would probably compensate anyway... but also I could gaussian blur the lower res sky too, to effectively upscale it?

I'm pretty sure Photoshop can retain the hdr information from the output Vue renders...

But the solutions you've proposed using dual maps or a non-homogeneous mapping sound like they'd also have the benefit of using less Poser resources?

Having the different panorama elements controlled by shader nodes could allow all sorts of other mat room adjustments too I'm guessing?

Quote - RV - your curvy horizon is the result of having the camera tilted.

Yes... thanks... I was meaning to mention I found that out too, with trial and error... camera x and z should be zeroed and y doesn't matter (I don't think).

EDIT: I'm meaning the rotation in my post above... not the position... and to correct myself, the correct terminology relative to the camera settings is Pitch and Roll... and Pitch should actually be 90 degrees... not zero. LOL. Zero faces skyward ;-)

Here's another, more straight forward ocean scene. The lo res copy is in my gallery here (click image above to link through).

There is also an hdr version available, for the time being, from the download page here:

http://bananas.monkeycloud.net/panoramas/beta/

(this link is to a page, rather than a direct link so that I can amend the locations of the actual download files later if necessary)

10,000 pixels wide was taking far too long... 4000 wide is more manageable at this stage, so I will stick to rendering at this, for now... at least until I'm sure I've got a good enough scene to be worth the wait!

So, the hdr version available from the above link is basically 4000 pixels wide, not the full 10k or 12k.

If you try out the hdr, please post back here and let me know how it goes?

I'm now working on doing some landscapes...

Cheers ;-)

I'll have a go using the hdr in Blender - let you know how Cycles like it - thanks for that, mate!!

Cool - thanks RobynsVeil. That'll be interesting to see... at some point I will get on to playing some more with Blender... and Cycles.

I'm keeping an eye on how reddog's Poser Tools for Blender plugin is coming along... that looks like a very interesting project on the Blender front.

:-)

Hi monkeycloud.

Those background images are looking nice. We can always use more background images for outdoor products. If you do create some 8,000 or 10,000 wide images would you be cool with us using them in our product site renders?

Would be great to have some images with forrests in the distance or mountains in the distance, with great lighting.

bagginsbill and my self have teamed up to create some products together.

Tom AKA DreamlandModels

hi monkeycloud, looking good. What happened to your dog, testing new hair colors?

Quote - hi monkeycloud, looking good. What happened to your dog, testing new hair colors?

He raided a packet of Skittles...

;-)

Quote - Hi monkeycloud.

Those background images are looking nice. We can always use more background images for outdoor products. If you do create some 8,000 or 10,000 wide images would you be cool with us using them in our product site renders?

Would be great to have some images with forrests in the distance or mountains in the distance, with great lighting.

bagginsbill and my self have teamed up to create some products together.

Tom AKA DreamlandModels

Hi Tom

I have procured both the Poser Chevy and the Car Patio, produced by your good self and Bagginsbill. They're very nice... looking forward to seeing more to come :-)

You guys, and anyone else who wants to, are welcome to use these panoramas in renders, both in personal artwork and in commercial product promotions. A credit for the usage would be much appreciated of course ;-)

If anyone would like to distribute the hdr source image files as part of a product package, either a freebie or a for sale item (e.g. if they have a model set and are distributing that with an environment dome part and would like to include an hdr or two to make it user-friendly) then please contact me to check what you're planning is okay by me.

In most cases I can imagine just now (e.g. the example I just gave) that would likely also be fine by me, but its probably wise to reserve the right to veto this, for now.

I guess, at some point in the future, if I get really good at these, and I produced some really deluxe versions, I may consider making some form of commercial version.

But in terms of what I'm producing on this front right now, these are all intended as freestuff... which I think is most appropriate given they're intended as an add-on for Bagginsbill's free Environment Sphere.

Once I've got a decent set of hdrs, at the most suitable resolution, I am thinking I will make a zipped package in an easily installable runtime structure, with some sort of pose file or mat file based method provided to easily apply them, and add a link in the free stuff section here, etc.

Cheers ;-)

Well, I for one will be quite keen for them, MCloud... this one sets the stage for this (by now somewhat over-worked) still-life set quite nicely:

Click for larger version

Quote - Well, I for one will be quite keen for them, MCloud... this one sets the stage for this (by now somewhat over-worked) still-life set quite nicely

Very nice! - thanks Robynveil :-)

Out of interest, have you got some sort of focus blur going on there, relative to the background envsphere panorama image, I take it?

These are great - thanks for the ones you've released so far, and looking forward to the ones to come...

Are cityscapes a possibility? Obviously there would be a lot more work involved, but I'm wondering if Ecosystems could take care of such things as traffic and more distant buildings.

Now we have the recipe, I can try making some of these myself. 

As far as I know, yes, city builings made from eco systems is possible... and there are some eco-system compatible building models (least I think I saw some) in the Cornucopia3d store.

How these might be made if one wanted to diy-model such buildings, I'm not sure.

Conceptually, this might just be similar to the idea in Bagginsbill's current "Morphing Prop" thread...??? I don't know if Vue's trees, for example, are variated in an eco-system based on some sort of morphs...

Don't know how roads would work either... if this was a requirement... but I expect there is some clever Vue shader trick to do this... or its done with the splines feature.

...I am new to Vue too and really this idea of making spherical panoramas is a way of giving myself some impetus to play with Vue a bit more... because I have it sitting there... and it is really cool.

I've been more focused on learning Poser since I got it...

But I found myself pining for some better panoramas to use in the envsphere... hence this side project.

;-)

Quote - Well, I for one will be quite keen for them, MCloud... this one sets the stage for this (by now somewhat over-worked) still-life set quite nicely

Also, RobynsVeil, I looked more closely at the picture in the frame on the wall... that's not a Vue render too is it?

;-)

monkey, the caustic under the sphere indicates it isn't poser render. 

I tried enlarging one of these smaller hdri (~ 6000X3000, converted to jpeg) using genuine fractals trial version and they don't show too many artifacts, excepting where the image has edge transitions.  for images using just sky and ocean (smooth gradients), genuine fractals or APS bicubic would work well AFAICT, provided the horizon line is hazed over.

Quote - > Quote - Well, I for one will be quite keen for them, MCloud... this one sets the stage for this (by now somewhat over-worked) still-life set quite nicely

Also, RobynsVeil, I looked more closely at the picture in the frame on the wall... that's not a Vue render too is it?

;-)

It's Blender

Quote - Very nice! - thanks Robynveil :-) Out of interest, have you got some sort of focus blur going on there, relative to the background envsphere panorama image, I take it?

Thank you, MonkeyCloud. Actually, if there is 'focus blur', it's not by design.
Meaning: I just applied the image (HDR) to a 'skydome' (half a UV-sphere with a bit of the the top cut off as well), with Cycles material set to emission, strength at .5.
Camera focal length is set to 35mm, perspective, clipping 4cm to 1km (far beyond the reach of the skydome), DOF is all set to default settings (Distance: 0, Size: 0, Blades: 0, Rotation: 0, Focus set on nothing - or everything).

Sheesh, just noticed, Blender comes with a "Composition Guide" that you can superimpose on your view. How good is this, then!

Quote - Also, RobynsVeil, I looked more closely at the picture in the frame on the wall... that's not a Vue render too is it?

;-)

Actually, no, that too is Blender. :woot: The water is a 9-node material. The artist has generously made the scene available for study. You can colour me obsessed. I do realise this is a Poser forum, so I'm not going to try to seduce people over to the 'dark side' but jeez there is some cool stuff available out there. I'm just getting started: so far I haven't hit any walls - if anything, all I'm seeing is further horizons!

Quote - monkey, the caustic under the sphere indicates it isn't poser render. 

I tried enlarging one of these smaller hdri (~ 6000X3000, converted to jpeg) using genuine fractals trial version and they don't show too many artifacts, excepting where the image has edge transitions.  for images using just sky and ocean (smooth gradients), genuine fractals or APS bicubic would work well AFAICT, provided the horizon line is hazed over.

Cool - thanks MissNancy. I will investigate those suggestions around upscaling...

...although, I'm also starting to make some progress towards getting scenes optimised better, I think.

My last test render with some landscape failed aesthetically... but it did complete in a reasonable 6 hours or so, at 4000 pixels wide. So that probably starts to place a 10000 pixel wide render within more comfortable reach, I reckon ;-)