I’ve got 6 maps rendered out of Maya via Mental Ray that I’m trying to convert into a spherical HDR image. The images are already in HDR 32-bit format. I’m merely trying to merge them into one spherical image. I’m having a hard time getting the images to stitch in Stitcher since there isn’t any overlap. Any thoughts on how to easily merge them? Am I missing something?

Thanks,
Bryce

Hi Bryce!

I have very minimal experience with generated panos such as yours - the last time was with a program called “Bryce” many moons ago.

What I did then was create a 90 degree FOV (for both horizontal & vertical) for the virtual camera… which should give you output as the (6) sides of a cubic.

So what you have at this point merely needs to have the edges of the cube faces “glued” together - it is not a stitching process. I use Stitcher v5.6.2 with which I would use the “Load panorama...” command and then select the first face (the six faces should be in their own folder). Stitcher should then select the rest of the faces automatically. Once loaded you should have the option to export to spherical, QTVR, etc.

I’m surprised Maya doesn’t directly offer the spherical mapping option itself.

G5 2x2.5, 7 Gigs, OS 10.4.11, Stitcher v5.6.2; D70-10.5mm Nikkor
Waterford Digital Design

My iPIX Interactive Studio with the Format Pack can “stitch” six cubic faces together and output them in any of its formats including an Equirectangular Projection (spherical image).

Unfortunately, it can’t work with 32-bit HDR files. They’d have to be TIFF, JPEG, etc

Good luck
Doug Aurand
Albuquerque, NM

Stitcher is really nice and I got that down okay - What I need to know is how are people setting up a QTVR panoramic camera in Maya?  I can’t find anything but very old scripts which don’t seem to work with Maya 2010 64.  Any help would be greatly appreciated.

TIA

you don’t have to stitch them you convert the cubic to the shere. I think there is a naming convention for the cube faces. you could first stitch a pano and output cubic to get the names. after renaming your cube faces you just import that pano by picking the first cube face and then you can render it spherical