Building a Cube World: Part 1

Excellent tutorial Carl. Just one comment: the plans (layers) are reversed. Note on the NO TURNS and NEWS ROOM text.
All the Best.

Okay. This is freakin' brilliant. I've done documentaries in previous years using Electric Fish's QTVR Matte, but it's orphaned, it's OS9 and AE 5.5 or earlier and it was slow. I've just offered up a test to my client and although it needs a little tweaking, it's a far cry from working from a 200MB QTVR file on OS9. Thanks, Carl!

D.A.Wagner
dawagner.com

Excellent Tutorial Carl; not only did I try it with the images you provided but then tried it on several images I found for Toronto. I learned quickly not all images are created equally - some line up better than others.

For readers, there is also another tool you can use on the Windows platform that's free for converting to cubic, look for Pano2QTVR; it costs if you want to make movies but free to use if you just want to convert to movies; just google for it. Worked perfectly.

Mark

I was trying to figure out the Hugin software - but i cant seem to export my photo in "faces"

Just wanted to add that if you need to generate cube faces and don't want to spend any money on it, you could easily do this in Hugin (an open source panoramic suite), by using the command line tool "nona" (which also comes with Hugin or can be built on its own), or with PTStitcher (part of the Panotools open source package).

Hi.

I`m wondering if there is a free option to "Cubic Converter" (witch is 99$, much for a poor student) or the panocube (10$ is cheep, but didnt like the program.) I`m using a mac.

Thx alot for the greate tutorial. Keep ut the good work !

Hello Carl,

Awesome tutorial but am not able to test it :(

Panocube Software is throwing up some bunch of virus(s) in virustotal.com. Not sure if it is false positive? Any idea?

Tx,
Hafeez

can you give the name of the font you used on the title banner of your tutorial i've been looking for it and i didn't find it yet.thanks a lot.

what browser are you using? Is it up-to-date? Do you have quicktime installed?

You're on the right track.

The images are in fact being scaled up far beyond 100%. But, they're also getting proportionally farther away from the camera. So, "to the camera", no pixelation is happening and everything renders perfectly.

Andrew Kramer has a fantastic tutorial that demonstrates a similar camera principle (scaling above 100% with no image degradation) in his 3D compositing tutorial here on the cow.

http://library.creativecow.net/articles/kramer_andrew/3dcompositing.php

I do see that the images are not being scaled at all, yet they are being parented to a null that is being scaled...I'm really missing something.

Scaling up the world scaler null makes the cube larger. As it scales up, the cube faces move further away from the camera, making the corners of the cube appear flatter to your eye. Once the cube faces are far enough away, your eye can't tell the difference between being inside of a cube and being inside of a sphere and the trick works.

1000% was just an arbitrary number that seemed to work well at the time of the recording. Any "large" number will suffice.

Wait for it...

Also, this:
http://csfour.com/files/photomerge.html

I'd like to throw in that cycore has a plugin called CC environment, when applied to a layer it works with a 3d camera as a 2d layer using an equirectangle map

just another plugin that deserves it's due. Works well.

still the creating a cube and using it as an environment map, well i was very surprised that worked so well, more cow 4 you.

Jerry -

Thanks for the comments. It is possible to do the equirectangular to cubic conversion in photoshop, but as far as I know you can't do it using the built in tools alone. Instead, you need to buy the $30 LensFix CI / Panotools plug-ins from Kekus Digital -There are probably other approaches out there, but I'm not aware of them at this time.

If you choose to pursue the Buy LensFix CI / Panotools plug-in route, here's a link to a very useful tutorial on the subject:

http://www.all-in-one.ee/%7edersch/panorectilinear/panorectilinear.html

If you are feeding the plug-in a full 360 equirectangular image you'll have to run the plug-in six times with the following settings to get your cube faces.

Image:
HFov: 90
Width: 2000
Height:2000
Format: Rectilinear

Panorama:
HFov: 360
Width: 0
Height: 0
Format: PSphere

Position:
Yaw: 0 Front, Top, Bottom; -90 Left, +90 Right, 180 Back
Pitch: 0 Front, Back, Left, Right; +90 Top; -90 Bottom
Roll: 0

Two final thoughts: You may be able to find a script out there that does all the data entry for you, or you could record an action within photoshop to do the same thing. Personally, I think cubic converter is a slicker method for an 8 bit workflow, but you may have to get the plug-in if you find yourself in a 32 bit pipeline.

Hope that helps!

Just adding to the comments saying that this is an awesome tutorial! Looking forward to Part 2.

This could not have come at a better time. Very simple and fast. I have this exact need right now. Thanks! BTW - I grew up in Saint Cloud, MN. Minneapolis College of Art & Design grad. Small world!

look forward to part 2

Hi, good tutorial. Especially being that its free. I never go into using pano pictures in AE but I always wanted to. I was wondering though. Could you use Ps CS2 or higher to do the cutting up of the pictures. Thanks for you help.

Jerry Nieves

This is one of the freshest and
inovative tutorials I have seen
here in awhile,
it is also clearly explained step by step.

Great job Carl, I can't wait for part 2.