Track Panorama

[KingBob]

Hey all

Have just finished a panorama from another local track here in Western Australia. We had an event today, the Hardman Cup, named after a young racer who was killed in a car accident a few years ago on his way home from a race.

This track is the offroad side of Ryper Hobbies, in Perth, Western Australia. You can sorta see their onroad track behind everyone. have done a pano of that as well, a link is on the website, you'll find it if you want to see it :P

http://www.rcracephotos.com/special/hardmancup.html

[Bathy]

That's well cool!!!

I guess thats the same thing Estate Agents use all the time on their websites?? They always have these shots inside homes that you can move around, same kinda thing huh but works really well on RC track.

Every track needs one taken :)

[KingBob]

Thanks dude. I've made one at most of my local EP offroad tracks (since thats what i race) but also have an onroad track, and will be adding a few more soon.

All are there at www.racephotos.com

[JCJC]

WOW, another good one, guess you boys would have to be careful with all that sunshine? Any problems with overheating, motors, batteries, electrics or tires.:)

[k£v!n]

That is great! The quality of the image even when zoomed right in is outstanding!

Nice work mate!

Kev

[KingBob]

WOW, another good one, guess you boys would have to be careful with all that sunshine? Any problems with overheating, motors, batteries, electrics or tires.:)

That'd be our #1 problem actually. Most of our car bodies have extra cooling holes cut in them. At a recent event, nearly every car in 1 class thermalled and had to stop. Of course the thermometer in the pits said it was 48deg C, so it was a bit of a toasty day.

But we did smell scorched motors yesterday as well, goes with the territory, just have to gear a bit less hard to avoid some heat.


Glad everyone likes the panos, theres more of local tracks at my website, the older ones are of slightly less quality though, i've gotten better at making them. Even that one, the quality is reduced to about 50% to keep the file web friendly(1.5mb). A high quality one is about 60mb!


Jimmy, when you gonna make some?

[TRF_Tastic]

Something that Im doing for my local club
http://i32.photobucket.com/albums/d32/Fast_as_a/RisbyindoorTrack2-1.jpg

[philly]

Thanks dude. I've made one at most of my local EP offroad tracks (since thats what i race) but also have an onroad track, and will be adding a few more soon.

All are there at www.racephotos.com (http://www.racephotos.com)
Bob, what softwae are you using for this stuff. It's fantastic. Congratulations!:cool:

[KingBob]

Bob, what softwae are you using for this stuff. It's fantastic. Congratulations!:cool:

Hey dude.

Theres several different applications you can use, so i'll just explain what works for me. Theres no single program to do it, but a combination.

First:
Take the photos!
How you take the pics will depend on what lens you're using. My first pano was done with a Canon EOS 20D and a Canon 10-22mm EF-S lens at 10mm (16mm fullframe equivalent). This required 28 seperate photos to get the full 360 around with 30-40% overlap in images to allow stitching.

My new ones i do Sigma 8mm Fisheye lens, means I can do it in 6 or 8 shots. You also need to pivot the camera properly, you need to pivot around the nodal point of the lens, to get rid of parralax errors in the images. The nodal point is the point in the lens where the light crosses over and inverts, kinda hard to explain.

Second:
i run the pics through photoshop a bit to clean them up, fix any errors, run some unsharp mask over it, noise reduction etc. Then stitch the photos. For this i use panorama tools which unfortunately isn't free.
This is time consuming, and is really a try it and see type thing. Basically you import the images, and then set control points to link photos, so the software knows which pics to stitch where. It does take some playing to get a final image. From this, you get a equirectangular image, which looks way out, but works properly if mapped to the inside of a sphere.

Three:
Turn the image into a quicktime image. For this I use an app called Pano2QTVR which is free for non-commercial use from here.

And voila, a panorama.

The first one i did took me about 12-14 hours, but i've gotten better and can do them in 1-3 hours now, depending on how much photoshopping is needed.

[philly]

Thanks for the info.
I can see a few sleepless nights in my future!!!

[BenG]

Something that Im doing for my local club
http://i32.photobucket.com/albums/d32/Fast_as_a/RisbyindoorTrack2-1.jpg (http://i32.photobucket.com/albums/d32/Fast_as_a/RisbyindoorTrack2-1.jpg)

Gotta love google sketch up:D

[KingBob]

Thanks for the info.
I can see a few sleepless nights in my future!!!

Heh, good luck! I was almost tearing my hair out for my first one, 28 pics!

I'm waiting for Jimmy to do some! he's at all the UK tracks and is well known so he should make them!

[JCJC]

Bob, what softwae are you using for this stuff. It's fantastic. Congratulations!:cool:

You have to page back to Bob's earlier posts for more descriptions of the software.
Look here: http://www.oople.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1512


and of course more stunning images.........