Large object movie

Mt. Wilson telescope, captured by Carel Struycken:

Quicktime version

Flash version

See the telescope as Panorama

The HDRI-Handbook is available!

Click here to go to the HDR Handbook Homepage.

You can order the Book via Amazon.

The topics include:

• Understanding the foundation of HDRI
• Tools for a High Dynamic Range Workflow
• How to capture HDR images: now and tomorrow
• Tone mapping for creating superior prints
• HDR Image processing and compositing
• Shooting and stitching HDR panoramas
• Image based lighting and CG rendering
• World premiere of Picturenaut and Smart IBL
• Creative uses and unconventional applications

Ars Electronica 2007 - The panoramas

The panoramas from the 2007 event are now online.

One of the festival's main themes concentrated on "Second Life" and presented an interference of virtuality with reality. Unintentionally, the exhibitions in the "Mariengasse" and "Pfarrplatz" exposed some scurrility by taking place in a street struggling with abandonment and forsake - something you may be familiar with in Second Live...

Click to open the AE 2007 pages

Sound is still missing, unfortunately. No time to edit and add the snippets to the panoramas. I hope to catch up soon.

Sliced Gigapixel Panorama Rendering: "Slicer"

One of the most annoying problems in gigapixel imaging is the fact that most image formats can't handle large files. Some proprietary (like Photoshop PSB) or rare (like VIPS) can do, but using them will inhibit continous workflow.

In an attempt to circumvent this restriction - and to make rendering faster, i have created a small helper application that will divide a large PTGui/Hugin project into smaller slices.
The rendered panorama slices can be easily post-processed or assembled in your favorite application.

You can download the current version here: http://dativ.at/slicer/

Update 2007/10/17: Microsoft Research has updated its HDMake tool. It can now assemble tiled source images. See this HDView blog entry for more information.

Compiling latest Hugin on OpenSuSE 10.3

Good news: with openSuSE 10.3, most dependent libraries for Hugin 0.7beta are in the correct state, so here's a quick roundup how to get and install:

• Download latest sources:
  svn co https://hugin.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/hugin/hugin/trunk hugin
  See http://hugin.sourceforge.net/download/ for more information
• Create bootstrap:
  ./bootstrap
• run "make", then "make install". You can speed up things with modern computers by using more than 2 CPUs, e.g. "make -j2" will use 2 CPUs.
• At least for Gnome, Hugin will automatically create a start menu entry
  

What else is needed to run Hugin?

• Mandatory: The panotools library (pano12):
  svn co https://panotools.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/panotools/branches/pano12/libpano libpano12
  See http://panotools.sourceforge.net/ for more information
• Optional: Autopano-SIFT (Tool for automatic creation of control points)
  http://user.cs.tu-berlin.de/~nowozin/autopano-sift/
  Install instructions for the ignorant:
  - unpack autopano-sift-2.4.tar.gz
  - copy all files from the ../bin subdirectory to your harddisk (e.g. /usr/local/bin)
  - configure Hugin to use autopano-complete.sh for control point creation
• Optional: Enblend (Tool for seamless blending)
  I recommend still using Enblend Version 2.5 as V3 introduced GPU-based calculation which - at least on my computer - turned out to be tricky to compile.
  http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=123407