cayling

I have been asked to produce a number of photomontages of I site I will be starting work on soon. I will be modeling the site in 3D Studio Max, and then finishing them off in Photoshop, including stitching the photos etc. I have done this on many occasions, however this time it has been that the photographer take a panoramic photo to pass onto me to use.

My current method is to align each photo in Max individually and then snap these renders to the stitched montage in Photoshop. Although this can give a slight stepped effect, this is prefferable over the blend alternative at this stage buy the client.

My question is - has anyone completed an accurate photomontage using a panoramic photo? (not a stitched montage but a raw photo), and if so can you just adjust Max`s camera settings - lens and FOV?

I have matched varying lense settings before, but nothing to this degree of distortion.

Any ideas would be great

C

johnvid

Hi,

your description of the process is a little confusing, If the photographer is supplying you with a perfectly stiched 360 panoramic @ 2:1, then you should use that as your Environment & Background (why not go the whole hog and ask him for a HDRI version of the Panoramic which would be more usefully and put a little bit of trouble back on his shoulders), and then render a 2:1 360 image (easy if you have Vray not sure about mental ray) But otherwise Max can render 6 images for a cubic panorama.

If your desire is to have a dis-jointed panorama (Like a Hockney Polaroid picture) then perhaps the method you are already using is the best, I think things could get a little tricky if you need to blend your building into the Image.

Ky Lane

Try using this : http://www.cs.ubc.ca/~mbrown/autostitch/autostitch.html

alexg

The guys at Hayes Davidson produced a book called Accurate that covers this stitched photomatch thing. I have tried contacting them about purchasing the book but no replies. You live in UK, so might just give them a ring?

I have similar project once, and what we do is to organise to get the unstitched raw images from the photographer, then render photomatch each image, then stitch them together for final, using the same method as the photographer.
It is a long and tedious process, but the end result and the distortion, is the closest you can get to the original photo.

__________________
Alex G
www.3da.net.au/www.3designarchitect.com

johnvid

CS3 now does a great job of autostiching images, Choose file menu, automation, photomontage and select all images to merge into your panoramic, it does the blending and everything. But the photographer should have already done that for you.