Arno Raps

One of the lenses in my collection is a 8 mm Peleng fisheye. The fisheye effect can be very nice when used with some caution, but one can use this little heavy russian gem also for 360 degrees panoramas.

Click the image for the flash panorama:


How do I create such a flash?

1. Preparing images

I'm using a Peleng fisheye, you can use other lenses too, but you'll need more photo's depending on the angle visible. The Peleng takes almost 180° photo's on my camera, so I only need 5 images, 4 to go around, 1 of the ceiling.

But I take more than 5, just te be sure and to make the stitching process easier.

I also take these images bracketed ( a -2, 0 and a +2 EV) and create a 16 bit HDR tiff file of each photo, this will take care of the enormous contrast and I like the colouring
Another way would be to put your camera on Manual and adjust the lighting by hand and then keep it fixed.

This will all make stitching easier.

2. Stitching

For stitching I use PTGui. I start the software and than load my prepared images:

I'll put PTGui in advanced mode, to be able to adjust more settings.

PTGui is quite clever in auto cropping and ordering the images. It will even automaticly try to find enough control points:




Because I don't have a real pano head on my tripod, I'll instruct the optimizer to use shift and shear correction:


And then after testing the preview I'll generate the quicktime:

I will also create a jpg image, to be used as thumbnail:


Okay now we have a nice quicktime pano

3. Converting quicktime to flash

Most people don't like it to have ten thousand plugins on there pc, so forcing someone to install quicktime to view your pano isn't a very good idea. Flash on the other side is installed on almost any pc with a browser, so that should do the trick.

For the conversion I use Pano2VR. It can do more than just converting your quicktime to flash, like:
• autorotation
• inserting patches (for example the floor part)
• creating hotspots
• creating buttons etc..



Lets import the quicktime file:


Because I can't fly, I always have to either block the floor part (limit view) or patch it with another image, or you would see an mangled view of my tripod legs or even my shoes


So I'll extract this and edit it in photoshop, and then apply the patch.

If I don't want to patch I could also block this part of the pano with the viewing limits:
and put the bottom limit on something smaller than 90° (60 till 70 will do normally)

But now I only will set the start point.

Okay all done, now I can set some options for the output flash file:


I would like some buttons and a loader and to autorotate it when loaded.

Done

Good luck trying yourself, show your results

http://www.hierzo.net/pano/mahy.swf

You can view all my 360° pano's on my website

Software used:
• PTGui
• Pano2VR
• Photomatix (or use the Pro version of ptgui)