Panomania - now with added cheese...

[Derek McAllan]

G'day all,

Well, once more I've been playing with some more panoramic shots and I'm going to share a couple of the results of my experimentation.  These pics were all assembled in Hugin from a number of screenshots taken in FSX via an external EzyDok camera.  It can be a pain to get the camera angles right, as the axis of rotation of the camera is constrained to the XY (yaw) plane of the aircraft... meaning that to get a set of level shots the aircaft MUST be in straight and level flight.  You can get away with a few degrees error without too much distortion, but the more error there is the harder it becomes to stitch these suckers together.  As with the others I've posted, click for maximal embiggenation.

Ok, first off the rank we gots us a Cessna 308 burning hard from Cooktown to Cairns.  This is a higher resolution image than my previous posts, mainly due to the fact that I manually stitched the 1920x1200 source shots together in Hugin rather than relying on the basic pano autostitch in Xara.  The plane, and hence the camera, were very close to cloudbase, resulting in very flat cloud bottoms... this was unintentional and I think it looks a bit freaky, but the rest of the image came together nicely.  This pano displays approximately 320 degrees of landscape, with East marked by the sun reflection on the ocean, and was stitched from 1 row of 5 source shots with no real processing... so it looks pretty true to how FSX looks on my PC.

[img width=1160 height=262]http://fsfiles.org/flightsimshots/images/383AyresRockPano_01.jpg

Next up we have a slightly different beast.  This is a lower resolution composition of Ant's Tigermoth flying over Ayre's Rock on a nice sunny summer's day.  Why is this different?  Well for starters, this is a 360 degree panorama.  The view encompasses the whole landscape.  Secondly, it has a larger vertical field of view, about 140 degrees in this case, centred on the horizon.  It was stitched from 2 rows of 8 images which had been downsized from 1920x1200 to 1280x800 to speed things up a bit, with no colour or exposure processing applied, again, this is how FSX looks to me.  I wish I'd kept the original full res shots and restitched it from those as I'm pretty happy with the outcome of this one, but I'm an idiot and accidentally deleted them.  /me facepalms

[img width=1160 height=253]http://fsfiles.org/flightsimshots/images/476CooktownPano_02.jpg

Finally, we have another 360 degree panorama.  This one's the DA-80 flying from Cooktown to Cairns, right near where I took the first pano above.  Again, it was stitched from 1920x1200 source images in 2 rows of 6.  Unfortunately my graphics card was playing up and AA got turned off, and I also lost a fair bit of resolution in the stitching process.  I'm not totally happy with this image, but it does have one thing going for it... I ran the images through a HDR (High Dynamic Range) process while stitching.  Ordinarily, with the high contrast of the dark landscape and bright sky the horizon would have been totally overexposed.  So, while I'm a bit bummed the res wan't what I wanted, the dawn colour rendition is exactly what I was after.

Righto, now I did mention added cheese, and here it is...

Those last 2 pano's, being 360 deg renditions, lend themselves to creation of scrollable and zoomable interactive panoramas... and that's exactly what I've done    Unfortunately, despite hassling Jay, it is not possible to embed the resulting QT movie files in a forum post, so if you want to look you'll have to click the following links and download the movies.  They can be viewed in Quicktime, or your browser window if you have a QT plugin, and are both scrollable and zoomable, although they are best viewed zoomed all the way out.  Resolution has been kept low to minimise file size.

http://www.mediafire.com/?deg3a5z7ab256md : This is the Ayre's Rock + Tigermoth pano at 1.41Mb in size

http://www.mediafire.com/?ytzxcaxxqnyb846 : This is the DA-40 near Cooktown pano at 1.25Mb in size

But wait!  There's more!!  Here's a RL photo pano I whipped together tonight for the Mrs from some holiday snaps taken near Margaret River over here in W.A. last week... 

[img width=1160 height=139]http://img242.imageshack.us/img242/2982/pano101.jpg

That there is a composite of 9 snaps taken with a handheld Olympus SP550UZ and quickly edited together in Hugin.  It was a rushed job, so there's a couple of spots where there are ghost images from poor alignment, and I can't be arsed redoing it at the moment 

And here it is as a QT Movie, 3.63Mb... http://www.mediafire.com/?3cc7aa5owu2jeou

Hope you've enjoyed!  As always, please let me know what you think 

Cheers,

Derek

PS - for those of you with more knowledge than me of the graphics systems used in FSX, if you know what sort of projection the camera simulates, please enlighten me.  I've always assumed it's rectilinear, which is how I treat my images when processing, but at the lower zoom levels there's way too much distortion for that.  Full frame, cropped fisheye maybe?  I don't know 

[tennyson]

Fantastic shots, mate.

I love them, very creative,

Frank

[alan2]

Yeh, a great technique . Opens up another possibility .

On that real life photo , when I clicked on it , it enlarges  the photo underneath , which was great but the problem I had was the scroll bar is below my screen . So I had to scroll down off the picture to move it along .  What Im saying is, if you had an extra special picture you want to show make sure you dont have writing underneath it , that way you can scroll the pic along without loosing sight of it , if you get what I mean.

[moonman]

COOL - like them all very much... the one with Uluru on it is my personal hit, because of this "never-ending-like dessert-panorama"!

have a nice flight

[Dexter Dog]

You are really capturing something special with these!

[Atomic_Sheep]

resulting in very flat cloud bottoms... this was unintentional and I think it looks a bit freaky

Didn't even notice it till you said it and even now it looks fine to me. Fantastic shots! The Ayers rock is my fave. These images are fantastic... almost sticky deserving!

[Derek McAllan]

Thankyou everyone for all the great feedback!  I'm glad you are all enjoying my little experiments in Simulated Photography 

Needless to say, I'm beavering away on some new stuff... and I've recovered my deleted Ayre's Rock files to reprocess at higher res!  A few people have asked for help with recreating this type of image, I'm more than happy to share what little I actually know and will try and put something together in the near future 

Cheers!

Derek

On that real life photo , when I clicked on it , it enlarges  the photo underneath , which was great but the problem I had was the scroll bar is below my screen . So I had to scroll down off the picture to move it along .  What Im saying is, if you had an extra special picture you want to show make sure you dont have writing underneath it , that way you can scroll the pic along without loosing sight of it , if you get what I mean.

Yep, I hear ya mate.  It's hard to post large image formats like this in a forum without that kind of issue.  The best way to view any of these is to right click and open in a new window or tab, then use your regular browser scrollbars.  Will see what I can do about it in the future though...