Jan
18
Rose Bowl in 3d
January 18, 2010 |
I took a lot of pictures at the Rose Bowl.
My goal, well one of them, was to try and create a panorama image of the facility.
I tried three times. Well, like 10, and this is the culmination of roughly 15 hours of work and testing.
I created a panorama in Photoshop via the automatic Batch Stitching tool. It came out ok, but lacked the detail when I zoomed in on it completely. That bugged me. But it looks decent. Below is a small preview of it. You can also download a larger (10MB) version of the file here. I may print out a poster of it for my house.
One of the things that really frustrated me with Photoshop is that I could not get it to do a 360 degree view. The big screen in the Rose Bowl was right behind us. This made us have to turn around to see it. But I had taken pictures of all the way around the bowl. Or so I thought, turns out I missed like 10 degrees to the right of the screen, but it wasnt important. I wanted an image which contained the scoreboard in the bowl. And I could not get photoshop to do it. Or at least, not joined with the main image. SO I have this piece, of what the stadium looked like behind us. Also available larger here.
I asked around, amidst my frustration with Photoshop, and was told of a piece of software called PTGUI. This software is designed for combining images. It can make a fancy stitch. The trial version lets you create an image, but not save your work, and uses a watermark. I used it to create a stitch manually, which isnt blended well, and but which has more of the detail I was longing for in the previous image. Unfortunately, I never could get a decent looking image including the stuff behind us. The field is rich, the stands can be zoomed, and its, well, ugly. But it was a fun learning experience. And if I wanted to spend a little more time, I could blend the edges, match the colors, and make it fit together as the automatically created version does. Again, a full download is available in jpg, if someone cares enough to click on it, its 11MB. Here.
But the really cool thing that came out of this playing, is PTGUI. It can make Quicktime VR files. A Quicktime VR file is a 3d image, allowing you to do a full pan of something, and scale up, down, right left, zoom in, its rad. I was able to create one, including the rear images, to encompass our view at the stadium. For size reasons, I’ve attached the small one below. You can go get to the full resolution one here beware, its 57MB. So yeah, you can in small form here, scroll around and see the 3d picture of the bowl.