Friday, June 25, 2004

With regards to yesterday's problem, I did some more testing and decided to see if RealViz Stitcher (RVS) 4 helped any. Yes, the resulting image did not show the banding problem when made into a VR with Stitcher or QTVRAS's maker tool. In fact I almost forget my original quest when I stitched a cylinder with RVS 4 and the quality of stitching when you use the Lanczos 5 method seemed at first glance to be as good as QTVRAS. I examined the two images very closely to see if Stitcher is better in some ways (besides the lack of banding in the downstream product, a QuickTime movie). And there were a handful of very small (and normally not very visible) stitching artifacts in the 15000 pixel wide QTVRAS image, which were not present in the RVS stitched image. Otherwise they were both very high quality stitches. I'm sure if I had worked long enough manually adjusting image pairs in QTVRAS, I could have cleaned it up some, but probably not fixed all of them. The point was I spent about the same ballpark amount of time setting up the stitchers, and RVS 4 was better or equal to QTVRAS for a cylinder (although in terms of stitching time, the Lanczos 5 seems to take a long time to produce the 15000 pixel wide image). This is truly great news. I have waited a long time for the tools to exceed the quality I was used to with the venerable QTVRAS. In the past I had a lot of trouble getting good stitches with cubic scenes and RVS 3.x, although I never figured out if it was my pano rig, the camera, lens, or something about RVS. Jim Scott even offered to work on one of my scenes and he improved the quality some, but either way it was not up to my standards for VirtualParks. Several times over the years I tried a cylinder stitch with RVS 3.x and compared it with QTVRAS, and I didn't feel it quite matched the stitching quality. So I'm looking forward to trying some cubic scenes with RVS 4, and will post my findings here. 4:13:04 PM

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