Has anyone here tried capturing panoramas inside their model railroad layout?
The idea of first-person exploration of a miniature landscape occurred to me a few months ago, and I've figured out a way to make it a reality.
This is a panorama captured inside a 1/24th scale miniature environment. It's just a test but it proves the concept can work:
Basically, I found a way to extract a panorama from a single image of a reflective ball (i.e. Christmas ornament) embedded in the miniature landscape:
I used Photoshop's polar coordinates filter to get this:
The next step after that, of course, is to paint out everything beyond the miniature and replace it with a digital sky extension.
I'm planning to sculpt a whole list of worlds soon, in miniature, and let people explore them in a first-person view, either with a QTVR tour or, ideally, with panoramic-interface code I've been developing in the Unity game engine.
Anyway, if you're interested and want to see more, I've got a teaser page for the project running at miniaturemultiverse.com
Obviously, this first miniature landscape is more or less just a test and looks pretty bad, but I hope to revise it and make the future miniature environments bigger and better quality.
I'm excited about what can potentially be done with this technique.
The idea of first-person exploration of a miniature landscape occurred to me a few months ago, and I've figured out a way to make it a reality.
This is a panorama captured inside a 1/24th scale miniature environment. It's just a test but it proves the concept can work:
Basically, I found a way to extract a panorama from a single image of a reflective ball (i.e. Christmas ornament) embedded in the miniature landscape:
I used Photoshop's polar coordinates filter to get this:
The next step after that, of course, is to paint out everything beyond the miniature and replace it with a digital sky extension.
I'm planning to sculpt a whole list of worlds soon, in miniature, and let people explore them in a first-person view, either with a QTVR tour or, ideally, with panoramic-interface code I've been developing in the Unity game engine.
Anyway, if you're interested and want to see more, I've got a teaser page for the project running at miniaturemultiverse.com
Obviously, this first miniature landscape is more or less just a test and looks pretty bad, but I hope to revise it and make the future miniature environments bigger and better quality.
I'm excited about what can potentially be done with this technique.
