360 Degree View of my Church

Post by **Sharp** » Sun Sep 09, 2012 8:33 pm

Hi all.
Here's a 360 Degree view of my local Church.

CLICK HERE

The image was taken by my Robot, so there's plenty zoom as this is a 150 Mega Pixel Image.

Regards
Sharp.

Spud · Post by **Spud** » Mon Jun 03, 2013 6:10 pm

beautiful photo Sharp

The building is lovely and I love the hammer beam trussed roof, thanks for sharing

cheers
Spud

michelkeijzers · Post by **michelkeijzers** » Tue Jun 04, 2013 9:48 am

Very nice ... somehow it looks a bit like a HDR and 'maquette', almost surrealistic. Very nicely done.

Beemer · Post by **Beemer** » Thu Jul 04, 2013 8:03 am

Sharp,

I too thought that your church is very beautiful and all praise to the architect and tradesmen who built it. How old is it?

On looking around I didn't see any artifacts or ripples in the joins. The only thing I noticed was stretch distortion. I can't remember which software I was reading about that claimed to eliminate such distortion.

I would be interested to learn what software you use and the lens.

Great photograph!

Ian (Nikon D300s)

Thoraldus · Post by **Thoraldus** » Thu Jul 04, 2013 12:54 pm

Sharp,

Excellent! What nodal mount did you use? I'd like to try my hand at doing a 360 image in this building ... The Paris Tabernacle in Paris, Idaho ...

Post by **Sharp** » Wed Jul 10, 2013 1:17 pm

Hi Beemer.
Far as I know it was built in 1822. Pretty sure about that. The stitching software I used was PTGui, although in saying that, I've moved on a long way since I've taken that photo. I've had to learn quite a bit about lens distortion, parallax errors, nodal points and so on. I've also spent considerable time writing my own tool for calibrating a robotic head, and I've made some custom hardware changes to it.

Lens used was a Sony Fish Eye, full fram 16mm. Camera is a Sony Alpha A900.

Cheers
Sharp

Post by **Sharp** » Wed Jul 10, 2013 1:38 pm

Hi Thoraldus.
That's a beautiful church. Very nice.

Sorry, I can't really recommend a nodal mount. I tried some and found them to be extremely time consuming. I went for full automation in the end and purchased a robotic GigaPan Epic Pro.

The problem with manual heads is you cannot align the images to a grid, so if you run into any problems, you will have to hand drop in control points and fix all parallax errors yourself manually. This can be extremely time consuming for certain scenes.

With a robotic system, once it's setup and programmed to run for the conditions your shooting, you can't really go wrong and they save so much time in the long run. Even for scenes where PTGui can't even pick up any control points are not a problem as the robot moves with precision, you can align to grid and solve 99% of all problems.

Overall, there's quite a bit to learn about taking 360 degree images. It's not by an means simple, even with a robotic head.

Regards
Sharp.

Thoraldus · Post by **Thoraldus** » Thu Jul 11, 2013 7:24 pm

Sharp wrote:Hi Thoraldus.
That's a beautiful church. Very nice.

Sorry, I can't really recommend a nodal mount. I tried some and found them to be extremely time consuming. I went for full automation in the end and purchased a robotic GigaPan Epic Pro.

The problem with manual heads is you cannot align the images to a grid, so if you run into any problems, you will have to hand drop in control points and fix all parallax errors yourself manually. This can be extremely time consuming for certain scenes.

With a robotic system, once it's setup and programmed to run for the conditions your shooting, you can't really go wrong and they save so much time in the long run. Even for scenes where PTGui can't even pick up any control points are not a problem as the robot moves with precision, you can align to grid and solve 99% of all problems.

Overall, there's quite a bit to learn about taking 360 degree images. It's not by an means simple, even with a robotic head.

Regards
Sharp.

Thanks Sharp,

I have done 180-360 panoramas by hand in Photoshop for quite a few years now. All have been landscapes where nodal alignment is not an issue. I'd like to do some interiors now, but as you said above, parallax errors, especially with nearby objects, can be a pain to deal with. How accurate and repeatable have you found the stepping with the GigaPan to be?

cheers,
Rick

Post by **Sharp** » Thu Jul 18, 2013 9:44 am

Sorry for the delay in getting back to you. I was away from home the last two weeks with dreadful internet access. Back to normality now.

Great, so you know the story and the problems with stitching images. Yeah, using a GigaPan pretty much removes all issues, but the procedure for stitching the images is a little different. You also have to use software that supports the GigaPan. I use PTGui myself.

The key is to use the Align to Grid function which is specific to the gigapan before running the normal image align function. Plus you will have to load Mask files so that PTGui knows how to remove the actual GigapPan from your images as it will most certainly be seen in all your photo's if you use a Fish Eye lens.

Once you have everything setup right, you can shoot a 360X180 with guaranteed perfect results every single time.

Regards
Sharp.

Madleine · Post by **Madleine** » Wed Jun 04, 2014 11:41 pm

Sharp wrote:Hi all.
Here's a 360 Degree view of my local Church.

CLICK HERE

The image was taken by my Robot, so there's plenty zoom as this is a 150 Mega Pixel Image.

Regards
Sharp.

Hello Sharp,

this is awesome !!!!!

Maddi

Korg Forums

360 Degree View of my Church

360 Degree View of my Church

Re: 360 Degree View of my Church