Spherical panorama: Epitaph

[HaLo2FrEeEk]

I started this a few weeks back, on Avalanche. I got a 360 degree cylindrical panorama made, but never went back and finished it. I even went through the whole process of finding a new panorama player, as you all probably read in my "quest for the perfect panorama player" thread. Well, I had some free time last night and decided to pursue my goal, but I wanted to do a different map. I loaded up a game on Epitaph and decided that was where I'd make my mark.

First thing I did was clear my screenshot cache, I knew this would take a lot of screenshots and didn't want to go over the limit of 50. Next, I loaded up the saved film of my game on Epitaph and chose the location for my panorama, and made a film clip a few seconds long. The reason I did that was so that I could exit the film and go back in in the same place.

Next I set my default rotation. I pretty much just eyeballed this, but I wanted a standard to go back to, a point to start and stop from. From here I just started taking screenshots. For each picture I would look at what was to the far right of the screen, then rotate the camera so that object was more toward the middle of the screen and take another screenshot. After each full rotation I would wait a minute or two for bungie to get all the pictures on the site, then use my Halo3Shots tool to back them up. Then I just moved the camera up or down a little and go to the next rotation.

I kinda messed up on the top and bottom images. For each rotation I took between 10 and 14 screenshots, but for the top and bottom I only took 4, each rotated 90 degrees. This messed up my final render the first time because there weren't enough similarities between the images. I managed to fix it by using some manually set control points in the program I was using to create my panorama, but it was a huge pain in the arse.

So I finally had my render, a huge image about 8,500 pixels wide and half that for the height. First thing I tried was using my program I wrote to create a jpe file for use in Panorama2Flash. Well, that didn't work, apparently cylindrical and spherical panoramas use different formats in their jpe files. So I had to find another option. I downloaded a tool called Pano2VR and tried it out. This tool has some amazing options, and allows you to completely customize your panorama viewer. It didn't take long for me to figure it out and generate a fantastic looking panorama player.

I even took the whole process a step further and recorded a few minutes of sound from the location that I was taking my screenshots from, then looped that sound using a simple technique, and embedding it into the panorama player. Now you not only get a full 360 degree spherical panorama, but you also get to hear exactly what it sounds like from that spot, and since it loops perfectly you'll never notice when it restarts. It adds one more level of realism to the whole thing and I love it.

So at this point you're probably wondering where you can take a look at this panorama, right? It's right here:

http://infectionist.com/images/halo_3/p...pitaph.php

And finally some stats about what it took:

113 screenshots make up this composition
Approx. 5 hours of work from taking the shots, recording the sound, setting the control points, and rendering out.
Total of over 20MB of screenshots
Final rendered image is over 100MB, rendered to .tif format, uncompressed.

I hope you all enjoy this. Despite all the work it took, I really enjoyed making it and hope to do a few more on other levels. Comments would be nice :)
_________________


~HaLo2FrEeEk

[HaLo2FrEeEk]

I started this a few weeks back, on Avalanche. I got a 360 degree cylindrical panorama made, but never went back and finished it. I even went through the whole process of finding a new panorama player, as you all probably read in my "quest for the perfect panorama player" thread. Well, I had some free time last night and decided to pursue my goal, but I wanted to do a different map. I loaded up a game on Epitaph and decided that was where I'd make my mark.

First thing I did was clear my screenshot cache, I knew this would take a lot of screenshots and didn't want to go over the limit of 50. Next, I loaded up the saved film of my game on Epitaph and chose the location for my panorama, and made a film clip a few seconds long. The reason I did that was so that I could exit the film and go back in in the same place.

Next I set my default rotation. I pretty much just eyeballed this, but I wanted a standard to go back to, a point to start and stop from. From here I just started taking screenshots. For each picture I would look at what was to the far right of the screen, then rotate the camera so that object was more toward the middle of the screen and take another screenshot. After each full rotation I would wait a minute or two for bungie to get all the pictures on the site, then use my Halo3Shots tool to back them up. Then I just moved the camera up or down a little and go to the next rotation.

I kinda messed up on the top and bottom images. For each rotation I took between 10 and 14 screenshots, but for the top and bottom I only took 4, each rotated 90 degrees. This messed up my final render the first time because there weren't enough similarities between the images. I managed to fix it by using some manually set control points in the program I was using to create my panorama, but it was a huge pain in the arse.

So I finally had my render, a huge image about 8,500 pixels wide and half that for the height. First thing I tried was using my program I wrote to create a jpe file for use in Panorama2Flash. Well, that didn't work, apparently cylindrical and spherical panoramas use different formats in their jpe files. So I had to find another option. I downloaded a tool called Pano2VR and tried it out. This tool has some amazing options, and allows you to completely customize your panorama viewer. It didn't take long for me to figure it out and generate a fantastic looking panorama player.

I even took the whole process a step further and recorded a few minutes of sound from the location that I was taking my screenshots from, then looped that sound using a simple technique, and embedding it into the panorama player. Now you not only get a full 360 degree spherical panorama, but you also get to hear exactly what it sounds like from that spot, and since it loops perfectly you'll never notice when it restarts. It adds one more level of realism to the whole thing and I love it.

So at this point you're probably wondering where you can take a look at this panorama, right? It's right here:

http://infectionist.com/images/halo_3/p...pitaph.php

And finally some stats about what it took:

113 screenshots make up this composition
Approx. 5 hours of work from taking the shots, recording the sound, setting the control points, and rendering out.
Total of over 20MB of screenshots
Final rendered image is over 100MB, rendered to .tif format, uncompressed.

I hope you all enjoy this. Despite all the work it took, I really enjoyed making it and hope to do a few more on other levels. Comments would be nice :)
_________________


~HaLo2FrEeEk

[Poisonblood]

Holy crap thats awesome. It feels in-game! Nice!
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[Poisonblood]

Holy crap thats awesome. It feels in-game! Nice!
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[HaLo2FrEeEk]

Thank you, it was certainly a lot of work, but now that I have the technique down I can do it again more easily.
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~HaLo2FrEeEk

[HaLo2FrEeEk]

Thank you, it was certainly a lot of work, but now that I have the technique down I can do it again more easily.
_________________


~HaLo2FrEeEk

[KJdog23]

That. Is. Amazing.

The level of quality is that of what I would expect from Bungie themselves. Great job!
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[HaLo2FrEeEk]

Thank you. And I just bought a new sound card with fiber optic input, so hopefully in the future I can get much better audio recordings, too.

I'm taking suggestions on the next map I should do, have any?
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~HaLo2FrEeEk

[HaLo2FrEeEk]

Thank you. And I just bought a new sound card with fiber optic input, so hopefully in the future I can get much better audio recordings, too.

I'm taking suggestions on the next map I should do, have any?
_________________


~HaLo2FrEeEk

[HaLo2FrEeEk]

So since no one replied when I asked for suggestions for the next map, I decided togo into the logs. People tend to try to...explore, to find content. The link to the panorama was this:

Infectionist.com/images/halo_3/panoramas/Epitaph/Epitaph.php

In the server logs I found multiple entried for failes access attempts to pages like:

Sandtrap/Sandtrap.php
Valhalla/Valhalla.php
Guardian/Guardian.php

Those pages don't exist, but apparently people want them to. I've set up cameras in film clips for sandtrap and guardian, and recorded the sounds for the ambience as well. I'm kinda dragging when it comes to making the actual panorama because of the time required to do it, but those are the next ones I'll do.
_________________


~HaLo2FrEeEk

[HaLo2FrEeEk]

So since no one replied when I asked for suggestions for the next map, I decided togo into the logs. People tend to try to...explore, to find content. The link to the panorama was this:

Infectionist.com/images/halo_3/panoramas/Epitaph/Epitaph.php

In the server logs I found multiple entried for failes access attempts to pages like:

Sandtrap/Sandtrap.php
Valhalla/Valhalla.php
Guardian/Guardian.php

Those pages don't exist, but apparently people want them to. I've set up cameras in film clips for sandtrap and guardian, and recorded the sounds for the ambience as well. I'm kinda dragging when it comes to making the actual panorama because of the time required to do it, but those are the next ones I'll do.
_________________


~HaLo2FrEeEk

[salamee]

My jaw dropped. This is just awesome.

Which monitor format is this optimized for? If you zoom in, everything is perfectly fine, even natural. If you zoom out, though, the stuff on the rim seems to be deformed, like in Halo 1. The things in the middle move slower than the things which are not in the middle, that's why you get a bit dizzy if you are not used to it.
It just seems as though you were looking through glasses you have never worn before, if you know what I mean; but I'm confident you can get this fixed.

Don't want to bash your work though, it's great!
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[HaLo2FrEeEk]

That effect when you zoom out is normal, it's because the screenshots use in-game field of view, which is 70. The viewer uses a 50 degree field of view, so zooming out a little works fine, but too much and it starts to display more than the eye thinks it should be able to see, so you get dizzy, there's nothing I could do about it.

Like I said though I do have plans for the next one, either guardian, sandtrap, or valhalla. Which do you guys want most?
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~HaLo2FrEeEk

[HaLo2FrEeEk]

That effect when you zoom out is normal, it's because the screenshots use in-game field of view, which is 70. The viewer uses a 50 degree field of view, so zooming out a little works fine, but too much and it starts to display more than the eye thinks it should be able to see, so you get dizzy, there's nothing I could do about it.

Like I said though I do have plans for the next one, either guardian, sandtrap, or valhalla. Which do you guys want most?
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~HaLo2FrEeEk

[salamee]

[KJdog23]

Valhalla could be pretty cool.

Too bad you can't get up in the sky though, remember doing that in the beta. It was fun.
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