Need help combining multiple spherical projections

#1

I’m not really experienced with texturing, and I would really appreciate some help with this.

Basically I’ve taken spherical panoramas from multiple positions within a room. I’ve created a rough 3d approximation of the room’s geometry, and now I would like to use the panoramas to texture this geometry. So I create a spherical projection and position it where the first panorama was taken from, and use that to project the image onto the geometry. So far so good.

But I’d like to use some parts of the other images as well, to texture the back sides of objects, and in areas farther away from the first position where the image starts to stretch. Here is kind of an illustration. The three images on the left are the room being textured from three separate spherical projections. The one on the right is an approximation of what I want to end up with.


(except way less ugly than this, sorry!)

Basically, one texture image and set of UVs that combine several spherically projected panoramas in a way I define. I cannot figure out any easy way of doing this, though, and as I said, I don’t have much experience with this. If someone could describe the workflow for achieving this, I’d really appreciate it! I’m working in Softimage 2012, but if you want to explain it using other software, that would be fine.

Thanks!

#2

How many objects need to be textured?

You could bake the panos onto your uvs several times - once per pano and merge the best bits.

I’ve done this once before but can’t remember if I used the above approach. I remember it was a bitch to do but my scene had a lot of small objects.

Imagemodeler automates the texturing. There are some gnomon DVDs that cover this.

#3

I’m actually already using Imagemodeler to calibrate the locations of the panoramas and get the layout of the 3d space, but I don’t really want to use it for texturing because
A) my panoramas are actually HDR, and Imagemodeler only accepts jpgs, and
B) I’d like to keep my workflow as simple and non-linear as possible- I’ll probably be editing and painting the panoramas at some point, and having to go through Imagemodeler each time would be kind of a pain.

I guess I’ll keep it as a last resort, though.

I’ve got a bunch of objects, but I haven’t decided yet if I want to merge them all into one single object. Can you describe how you would bake the panoramas onto the UVs and merge them? I’m not really sure what the process of this would involve.

#4

Are you using maya?

I’m a max user but I think it’s pretty similar apart from your projection options are better.

There will be some kind of render to texture dialogue. But before that you’ll need to unwrap you UVs. Once unwrapped - use render to texture to bake out a diffuse map mapped to your UVs. Project your next pano and repeat and obviously save the other ones to a different file. Done correctly then panos should line up with UVs and then it’s a case of maskin off the areas of each map in photoshop to create your texture.

So this can be done for the whole scene or per object. The advantage of this method is that you can paint any holes in photoshop. Dissadvantage is that its not a quick process.

What’s your intended output? Animation, real time walk through?

You can also apply multiple projections at the same time using masks but I can’t remember how off top of my head. Maybe try adding blend or mix material to your scene with one projection plugged into each. The. But you’ll need to paint a mask perhaps from new camera projection if suitable. Falloff maps can be used too but I didn’t get this to work properly - probably user error.

#5

This thread has been automatically closed as it remained inactive for 12 months. If you wish to continue the discussion, please create a new thread in the appropriate forum.