generating images for panoramas using cube maps

[bailenson]

Hello...

the tutorial on panoramas does not yet include info on how to create the files that viz imports into the environment for cube maps. Are there any existing help files on this? Thanks!

Jeremy

[tobin]

Many of the better panorama creation tools these days support cube map output. Here's a good list of software available today:

http://www.panoguide.com/products/

Also, this is a classic site with all sorts of free tools:

http://www.path.unimelb.edu.au/~dersch/

[bailenson]

Hey, by any chance are you familiar with the way the Photovista outputs a cube map panorama? I have tried it a number of times, and the output looks extremely different from the jpgs that you have in the tutorial on panos in Vizard.

Is there some special procedure that I don't know about?

Thanks for your time,

Jeremy

[mspusch]

As far as I know, Photovista can't generate cube maps because it doesn't stitch to full sphere. Let me know which version you have it you have on the stitches both horizontally and vertically.

[bailenson]

Oh, right, thanks for clearing that up!

Does Vizard 2.17 happen to have a new, quick way to render cylindrical 360 (non sperical) panoramas? Loading it as a single texture on the inside of a cylinder tends to create some problems while loading the texture, and breaking up the texture into multiple segments is a painful process.

Thanks for your advice!

jb

[mspusch]

Not sure it should have clear things up because I just looked at Photovista 1.3 and it does in fact support cube map exporting so I was wrong. I tried it and it puts all 6 maps in one image, stacked vertically.

You could fairly easily write a Photoshop "action" that would resize it first to say 512 x 3072 (6*512) and then pull out each of the size sections into separate documents. All you need to do is follow the naming convention given in the Vizard tutorial on creating panoramas.