Humus's Cubemaps

Rufus

Newcomer
I just noticed over on Humus's site he's added a new textures section with a bunch of cube maps. I've played around creating simple panoramic pictures before using hugin before, but never ones that have wrapped 360 around. I'm wondering if anyone (or obviously Humus) has pointers to tools that create cube maps. Also how do you take the "down" portion and have it stitch nicely without shadows?
 
nvidia's env map demo
http://download.nvidia.com/downloads/nZone/demos/nvidia/Bubble.zip

cm1ob5.jpg

cm2ft0.jpg

cm3un2.jpg
 
I just noticed over on Humus's site he's added a new textures section with a bunch of cube maps. I've played around creating simple panoramic pictures before using hugin before, but never ones that have wrapped 360 around. I'm wondering if anyone (or obviously Humus) has pointers to tools that create cube maps. Also how do you take the "down" portion and have it stitch nicely without shadows?

First, get a copy of Realviz Stitcher. It has a nice interface for assembling full 360 environments. When it works I like it. Occasionally when something moved between pictures (such as the clouds) or they don't line up nicely due to parallax errors etc it can be a bit of a pain and you have to resort to manual arrangement. I recommend buying a panorama head (I have one of these), it really helps a lot.

It's quite easy to get started with Stitcher, but it takes a while to master the program (I recommend going through the tutorials that comes with it). A nice thing about Stitcher is that it can render cubemaps. I don't know any other similar software that does this. Unfortunately, when rendering out cubemaps the "smart blend" feature is not available, which sucks because "smart blend" does wonders whenever you have any form of parallax errors in the picture or a couple of the pictures didn't line up perfectly, and that's typically the case, even with a panorama head (even though it improves a lot). So what I usually do is render with spherical mapping with smart blend, then resample it to a cubemap (which Stitcher can do for you). The problem with that is that the resampling creates some ugly artifacts up and down. Down is not an issue since that's where your tripod is (which you don't care for in the picture anyway), but up can be a problem. It's usually fairly easy to fix in photoshop though, especially if you have clouds you can just use the clone brush to paint over the artifacts. Same thing down, just some careful use of the clone brush to remove the tripod from the picture.
 
Back
Top