Hello Realfriends,
Does anybody have any experience in making VR environments with RS3D? I
mean
those panorama's mapped to cubes, cylinders or spheres, like in Quicktime
VR.
I remember someone on this list once described the whole proces with some
free-, downloadable software and a script for the camera in RS3D (V4?).
Can't reftrieve this information and perhaps it's all very obsolete.
So, I guess my question is, can anyone recommend a program or a tool to
create VR worlds from 3D?
Kind regards,
Frank Bueters
Hi Frank,
Two years ago I did some experiments in this area, I don't remember if I
posted anything about this...
It involved HDRShop (a great free program) and Blitzbasic (not free and
outdated).
The procedure was much more complicated than Matthias' approach, it didn't
occur to me that RS can evaluate the map directly:
- make a small chrome sphere in the scene (100% relection, color=0, nothing
else)
- use a camera that's looking at the sphere exactly from below, zoom in
- this way, you get a fisheye projection. Only a small area behind the
sphere is lost but that doesn't matter
- use HDRshop to convert it to latlong projection (I forgot which options to
choose), this will produce a map like the one in Matthias' procedure.
Then I wrote a little ultra-simple viewer program in Blitzbasic that allowed
rotation of the camera in the center of a sphere with this mapping. Pretty
convincing but Blitzbasic had severe limitations in texture size, among
other problems and I dropped the whole thing. It was fun, though.
A totally different approach is to stitch together 8 or more camera views
making up the 360 degree view together. There are many stitch programs but I
could never find a good free one, maybe things have changed in the meantime.
And then, how to view and navigate a scene? I never liked quicktime VR...
If anyone is interested, I have some latlong mappings lying around produced
this way, the Blitz viewer only works on my local machine (one of those
limitations).
-Mark
