Newfangled panoptical imagery.

In one of those 'I wonder if...' moments, I decided to have a look at stitching panoramas, and see how well it would work with game screenshots.

I had a couple of moderate successes, out of far more attempts. (it's surprisingly easy to miss an area when taking the screenshots to stitch together and thus have to start over again from scratch due to big blank spots in the final panorama.)

Cap Au Diable, Aeon City.

Steel Canyon, Icon.

Talos Island, uncropped.

All about 1Mb in size, but bleedin' huge in pixel dimensions, and all pretty heavily fisheyed with about a 180degree horizontal field of view, except for Cap Au Diable, which got cropped down to less than that.

The Talos image has issues with the sky, but that's because the sky wouldn't hold still and have its picture taken

:edit:

Atlas Park : The fisheye effect really does do some odd things to the roads

Very cool! I like the Talos one a lot.

Pretty nifty!

I would use a 5 pixel feather on the lasso tool, select the area of the sky widely, that you want to blend, and erase at about 20% slowly till it fades.

Or use the cool feature in photoshop cs5 (I know I know not many people have it yet) Clone Tool "Content Aware". Some very cool videos on You Tube of CS5 and Content Aware.

Very cool, love the talos one!

The Talos one is the best..The one with Icon looks like something you'd find in Google Maps....really cool.

Yeah the Talos one rocked my face. Good work! You should get a panoramic of the bowl(s) that the Hamidon(s) sit in. (Hive and Abyss)

Quote:

Originally Posted by Deus_Otiosus This entire post should receive some kind of award for being both hysterical and fantastic. Well done.

The Steel one is pretty striking because of the warp on the street but I do agree that the Talos one is the most impressive. As for the sky you do have to stop and look for it so I'm sure that a simple fade or blend would make it even less "obvious" and therefore unoticed by most onlookers.

That's really cool. What is the process to make that? How many screenshots do you have to take?

Ta for the responses folks.

The number of screens taken to make each panorama varies, depending on what sort of field of view you're after. If you want more vertical FoV, then you need another row or two of screens on top.

Cap Au Diable was 10 screens, 66Mb of .tga stitched together.

Talos was 11 screens, 72.5Mb (and my machine struggled a little with it, too much detail causing the stitching process to have to work for the result, I think.) :edit: <facepalm> I knew there was something I forgot. I ended up resizing the Talos source images down by 50% because my machine was choking a little too much on the full sized source images, hence why I was wondering to myself why it was so small... I may retake the source images and rerun the stitch when I'm not trying to use my machine for other things.

Steel was 9 screens, 59.3Mb.

As to the process, you take a sequence of overlapping screenshots (ideal overlap is about 40%, apparently) covering the area you want in the final image, and add a bit more round the edges for cropping later on. Then you can either go expensive or cheap.

Cheap is Autostitch and it's free, but didn't work too well with the game screenshots in my experience - It had problems lining up some hard edged objects, leading to ghosting.

Expensive is any version of Photoshop from CS3 onward, where you can either go semi-manual or fully automatic.

Semi-manual is to open all the source images as layers in one file, select all the layers and go Edit->Auto-Align Layers. Once it's ground its way through that, you can go in and manually tweak any layers that haven't *quite* lined up properly with the move tool, rescaling and repositioning until your'e happy, then with all layers selected again go to Edit->Auto-Blend layers.

Automatic is to fire up Potatoshop, File->Automate->Photomerge and select your source images, type of projection and hit go. Then, depending on the number and size of source images, go and make a cup of tea.

Automatic doesn't let you manually tweak positions of slightly iffy layers before the blend operation. Manual is a little more of a faff on.

When you're taking the screens, obviously you want the screenshot UI off, and you want to take them as fast as you can, to minimise movement of shadows/sky/other elements between panels of the final image.

Oh, and if your machine can take it, /visscale 4 and all the Ultra mode shinies turned on doesn't hurt, either. Just remember to set /visscale back to it normal setting before you try and play the game.

I've been having limited success with these. Out of about 5 or 6 tries at various scenes, only these two came out even half decent.

I think I may have gotten lucky on that Talos panorama

Firebase Zulu.

Grandville Tower Main Hall.



Limiting it to about a 120ish degree horizontal Field of view and only two rows of screenshots definitely seems to help drastically reduce the obvious fisheye distortions. Not flying and looking down helps, too.

:edit:

That said, this one of St. Martial's casino district at night has a much wider angle and seems to have come out OK.

And no, I'm not quite bored of these yet

Made myself a new desktop wallpaper from a slightly different angle of Talos Island. If anyone happens to want a version of any of these for wallpaper, let me know the screen res you want and I'll see what I can do.

Ooh I like the St. Martial one, I missed that before. Been watching this thread with much fascination.

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