A Tri-Cornered Hat...

Exploring the tetrahedral method of stitching dome masters

I've been playing with the Tristitch or tetrahedral method of creating dome masters


I set this scene up in Blender (3D package) - that mess in the middle, is 3 cameras setup like the pineapple site...

Pineapple

I rendered the view from each camera

Front:

Right:

Left:

This is the output from Tristitcher

This is what it looks like if you leave the two rear images off

This was done to test the quality of the stitching, I figured aligning text was about as hard as it gets...next I'll render a few 'scenes' to see the effect of leaving the rear cameras out. I haven't used real cameras yet, as I don't have a method of working out FOV for any given lens particularly mid-zoom. And it turns out this is critical. I think the above is promising - its far quicker and less ungainly than the cubic method - if only I could find the maths for it, it would transform realtime rendering dramatically...


I made an animation...all low resolution. One thing I went and checked on, that pineapple site has loads of software for sale, tristitcher seems to be the only product which is free....spot on!

We can now reliably create pre-rendered 3D using free tools. In a form that can be queued up for rendering on a render farm