Full-dome stills of Elephants Dream

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ED_08_04_60_pqAh, the joys of open content! Even three years after its release, people are still working with the Elephants Dream assets. Today, Dalai Felinto created a few full-dome stills of Elephants Dream, making the movie look even weirder. Pretty cool.

Dalai wrote:

Recently I went over my todo-list, and no big surprise I found a lot of fun stuff I was holding off for when I had more time.

Being graduated for a week now, I finally found time to finish some re-renders of Elephants Dream. I took the production files and selected a few scenes to produce full-dome shots.

Full-dome is an image that capture 180º field of view. In order to accomplish that I needed to render several renders of the scene and re-warp it (either with Blender or Hugin).

Dalai

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    • Grandmaster B

      Yes, cool stuff!

    • Mal

      Very cool indeed!

    • http://blenderecia.orgfree.com dfelinto

      Btw, in case someone is looking for a nice wallpaper, this equirectangular Elephants Dream image fits very well in wide screens (letterboxing it):
      http://blenderecia.orgfree.com/blender/dome/images/equi_ED_08_04_60.jpg

      And if you want help porting your renders to fulldome (there are other possible techniques as well) BlenderArtists can be a good place for this:
      http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?t=165419 (Elephants Dream fulldome stills)
      http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?t=159121 (using UV node for fulldome warping)

      Cheers

    • http://www.robo3d.com Robo3Dguy

      Way too awesome. The entire Elephants Dream should’ve been rendered in dome lol.

    • http://www.bursoft.org Jan Burianek

      It is really coll. I am trying to do the same, but I would like to do it in stereo…
      We have chance to show movie on hemispherical projection in Planetarium (8K x 4K resolution).
      You mentioned Hugin. Did you try new “Dome” features in Blender 2.49a? I like it, it works for real-time 3D but I cannot find way how to use it for off-line rendering :(. Any idea?
      Let’s join forces and produce new ‘dome version’ of Orange Project…
      JB

    • http://blenderecia.orgfree.com dfelinto

      @Jan:
      It should be possible to do it in stereo. I’m interested to see what you come out with.
      I’m quite aware of the “Dome” mode in Blender Game Engine. Indeed the method is quite the same I’m using for offline rendering (4 cameras + a warpmesh).

      As you found out it doesn’t do offline rendering though. It’s a different part of Blender code, and I’m afraid of changes in the render code for Blender 2.5. Therefore I’m not that in the mood to start coding it so early in 2.5 roadmap :)

      To produce a “dome version” of Orange Project would be awesome. I’m not that sure of how much time/resources that would take though.

    • http://www.canisius.edu/~langforc TechFalcon

      The snapshot here looks like a clip from a Beastie Boys video, haha. In all seriousness, very cool renders.

    • http://weber.edu/planetarium Ron Proctor

      Very nice.

      I’ve been thinking of doing BBB in fulldome for our planetarium. (We’ll see if I ever get around to it!). :p

    • http://blenderecia.orgfree.com dfelinto

      @Ron: nice!

      From my tests I think BBB would demand a lot of time/work. They have more half-modeled scenes than ED.
      And some camera tricks (like Hitchcock effect, scene where Frankie kills the butterfly) would be an interesting challenge to do for a fulldome.

      But I believe that this could work as well. Good luck

      (my early attempt :p I should’ve moved the camera close)
      http://blenderecia.orgfree.com/blender/dome/scene_01_01_frame_01_fulldome.jpg

    • http://albartus.com/ LOGAN

      hey dfelinto, I tried adding that wallpaper to a pamo viewer (PTView) and besides the image being lores I also got an unexpected white line where both sides meet. hmm, had to remove one pixel on the right side of the image that was white.

      Check out the test here:)
      http://members.home.nl/albartus/edpano/

    • http://www.bursoft.org Jan Burianek

      @dfelinto
      I made quite few tests and I thing it would not be good idea to use game engine ‘dome camera model’.
      You are right, off-line rendering is the only way how to ‘re-render’ Elephant Dream.

      OK then, dome stereo-rendering is quite difficult thing. The best way how to make such stereorendering correctly is “S. Peleg, M. Ben-Ezra, and Y. Pritch, OmniStereo: Panoramic Stereo Imaging, IEEE Trans. on PAMI, March 2001, pp. 279-290.”
      see
      http://www.cs.huji.ac.il/~peleg/papers/pami01-omnistereo.pdf
      I use this approach, but it take ages (you need rendering two cameras using many renderings of circular motion around common axis of left/right eye position). You need usually 8192 narrow images (5 pixels width) per one camera/shot…

      But if we do this approach correctly then it is very first fullfeatured correct stereo-spherical movie in history…

      Jan B