Panorama or not?

From reading the documentation and wut not, I was given the impression that the “Pano”
rendering button would automatically rotate the camera and give me a 360 degree view.
All I had to do was set the FOV and the number of “Xparts” and viola! But after assemblying my panoramic scene (Something I wanted to use as a World texture.) all I get when I set the pano button is a distorted image!?!?!?!?!
From the Blender manual:
"If the Xparts is greater than 1 and the Pano button of the Render Panel is pressed (Panorama button (F10).), then the rendered image is created to beXparts times SizeX wide and SizeY high, rendering each part by rotating the camera as far as necessary to obtain seamless images. "
I’m using the Windows version if that makes any difference.

EE

x parts of the size of your render. If you’ve set a 1000 x 100 and Xparts to 10 then you get 10 slices of a 1000 pix render.

Macouno had a cubic pano script on his site if that’ll help?
http://www.alienhelpdesk.com/index.php?id=16

Hmmm…
I know that Xsize is normally the width, however…
“then the rendered image is created to beXparts times SizeX wide and SizeY high”
this implies that it will be Xparts times SizeX in pano mode, if this is not the case then the documentation needs to clearify that.
My issue is doing EXACTLY what is on the Noob to Pro/Looking All Around - Panorama Settings doesn’t work. And nothing I can find online does. That tutorial says this:
“Go to the render settings (F10), and click the Pano button. Change the Xparts value to 4. The value in Xparts will tell how many times the camera will ‘turn’ horizontally when rendering. The Yparts value would do the same vertically. Each part (Xparts or Yparts) will render the size of the whole image you set.”
What am I missing?
My questions are:
Do I have to stich together multiple renders?
Do I have to rotate the camera myself?
What exact settings do you need to make the Panoramic output work?

EE

Ah, sorry, I missed that. .
From the blender manual
http://mediawiki.blender.org/index.php/Manual/Rendering_Options

I try that and only get the width of the camera as X number of parts with a lens distortion. The camera doesn’t actually move.

but apparently will give 360’

This technique will actually work really well with the cubic script mentioned. I wish I’d know that when I was trying to create cubes.

Yah, read that manual page it has the answers you are looking for. Again, sorry about the miscue.

The problem is that the manual that you are looking at is badly out of date…:evilgrin:

It used to actually increase the size like it says but since 2.42, the way the pano button works is completely different… this is from the 2.42 release logs( near the bottom of the page)

The old implementation for Panorma render was added quite hackish. It used the “X Parts” value to extend an Image size horizontally, and rotating the camera for each X Part.

Now the internal render system has become fully tile-based; enabling the Panorama option will automatically apply the panorama effect on all vertically aligned tiles (slices).
So you can just enable or disable the “Pano” button, to get a subtle lens effect, the output image size will still be same as without Panorama.

For Panorama render, the minimum slice size has been hardcoded to be 8 pixels. The “X Parts” button goes up to 512 to allow that. In practice, rendering 64 slices will already give very good images for a wide angle lens of 90 degrees, the curvature of straight lines then is equal to a circle of 256 points.

Rendering a full 360 degree panorama you do by creating an extreme wide angle camera. The theory says camera-lens 5 should do 360 degrees, but for some reason my tests reveil it’s 5.1… there’s a rounding error somewhere, or something related to the clipping plane start? We will look at that later. :slight_smile:

Also note that for each Xpart slice, the entire database needs to be rotated around camera to correct for the panorama effect, on huge scenes that might give some overhead.

Threaded render goes fine for Panorama too, but it can only render the parts within a slice in parallel (the Y-Parts). For the next panorama slice it has to wait for all threads of the current slice to be ready.

On reading old files, the settings from old files are converted to match as closely as possible the new situation.
Currently the code detects for old panorama by checking for the image size. If image width is smaller than height, it assumes it’s an old file (only if Panoroma option was set).

At least now I know why I was so confused! :eek:
"Also note that for each Xpart slice, the entire database needs to be rotated around camera to correct for the panorama effect, on huge scenes that might give some overhead. "
Does this mean you have have to manually do the rotation between slices?
And uh? How do you do that? :confused:
I’ll play with it for a min and see what I see…

E E

Nah, I think it just means “Blender internally computes a rotation on all objects but the camera, instead of on the camera, so if you have a gajillion objects/verts/whatever this part could take noticeable time”.

So, now i’m curious (instead of working)
camera lens 5mm, xparts 10 gives 360 degrees for pixel width sizes 500 to 2000…so should the wiki say that?