Tools you'll probably also want are a tripod and panohead to rotate the lens around its no-parallax point to reduce possible stitching errors. The tools you need are a camera with a lens, and panostitching software that can create a 360x180 panorama in equirectangular (2x1) format ( Hugin is a good open source application). I would then downsize it in something like Adobe Lightroom to the exact pixels you need. Don't forget to measure the nodal point of the lens and buy ($1200) or make ($10) a panoramic head so the camera always rotates about the lens nodal point to avoid parallax which will make it difficult to stitch the frames together if there are objects close to the lens.ĭepending on your camera you could end up with a 15,000 x 7500 pixel photo (112 megapixels). I would normally sweep 8 exposures overlapped about 30-40 percent (10mm crop sensor lens) to get 360 degrees. Remember that you may have to shoot in portrait mode and have two or more rows of exposures to get enough height to allow a 2:1 ratio when going 360 degrees. You would first need to shoot enough frames to cover 360 degrees. I am thinking that with this info you should be able to output a 2:1 ratio equirectangular mode panorama. It also shows how many pixels the panorama has before cropping. The last tab is the stitcher page and it has dimensions that you can enter for cropping. Its help file states that the equirectangular mode that it supports is a spherical mode. I have been using Hugin as a panorama stitching tool. When it works, it does and when it does not, well, you have to trying another. One such is MS ICE which I reviewed here. A good number of software now attempt to automatically stitch images which works surprisingly well. You can even try free software first and if those do not work, move on to a paid solution. Most stitching software can stitch such images and the success-rate depends mostly on the subject matter. For an indoor spherical panorama, consider a panoramic head essential. The closer things are to your camera, the more important this is. This is not hard, just tedious and you have to be careful not to accidentally change things. Otherwise, you need to calibrate the head to your particular combination of camera and lens at the focal-length you intend to use. If your lens is fixed focal-length, there are some models which are made precisely for a combination of camera and lens and need no adjustments. Doing so precisely by hand is nearly impossible, so most people use a panoramic head. Ideally you take the shots while rotating around the nodal-point of the lens. A compatible camera is obviously required. With a fisheye lens covering 185°, you only need two shots. Considering your resolution requirements are low though, I would opt for something very wide. With a smaller the field-of-view, more shots will be necessary. If the camera has manual controls, including manual focus, then it will be easier because you can ensure consistency between shots. If you use such camera, a remote-trigger device, like a cell-phone is needed to trigger it. If you use stitching software, then you need to have some overlap between images and will take slightly more images than enough to cover exactly the 360°.Īs a minimal setup, a single camera with a lens on each side, mounted on a tripod, can do this. You obviously need enough photos to cover the whole surrounding. There's a Flickr group dedicated to this.Spherical panoramas have a 2:1 aspect ratio because the field-of-view is 360° x 180°. If nobody has the remapping you want to try, and if you're geeky and hands-on with math and code, you could also use the Gimp with the Mathmap plugin. This is actually my go-to tool for reprojecting. OTOH, the list of projections is very impressive. But it does cost money and it requires a Photoshop license. You could also use the Flexify 2 Photoshop plugin from Flaming Pear, if the list of projections that Hugin offers is too modest for your taste. Once everything looks the way you want it to, save the Hugin project (.pto) file, and go to the Stitcher tab, select the file output format and size you want, and click the Stitch! button to create your new panorama. Watch your FoV setting, since not all projections play nice with 360. Use the Projection tab to select a different projection. Use the Move/Drag tab to change the viewpoint.ĭragging horizontally changes yaw, dragging vertically changes pitch, right-dragging changes roll. This will load your 360x180 as a 360x180. Set the Lens type to Equirectangular and the HFOV to 360. Go into the Interface → Advanced (or Expert) mode.Ĭlick the Add Images. Yes, since Google PhotoSphere panos are stored as equirectangular projections you can use Hugin to remap to other projections.
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