zwischendrin.com blog
8Jun/110

new hdri panorama equipment: Roundshot VR Drive

We thought: it's time for a quality boost!
We bought: Roundshot VR Drive 2 "full"

To bring much better HDRIs to our customers, we invested in new panoramic equipment. Before this we used a tripod, a digital camera and a fisheye lens to capture a fullspherical HDR panorama. While the process was very error-prone and time-consuming, the result was okay but far away from brilliant. The brand new panorama head called "VR Drive" automatically controls nearly every DSLR camera and takes photos in a pre-calculated order. No camera shaking, no more "waiting and clicking", no more problems while stitching all those pictures together for our panoramas. It's definitely a big boost for our pipeline!

You might ask "Okay, that's good for you but what's my benefit???"
Your biggest advantages are sharper HDRI panoramas, bigger HDRIs and a much wider dynamic range, which results in better 3D renderings!

The VR DriveRoundshot VR DriveSoon after you put everything together and attached the camera, you can start taking pictures (Seitz, the company behind the VR Drive, pre-installed a program to start discovering the product). You can easily edit and install different programs later on, which will then run after a single click on the START button. The interface is intuitive and our first results proved really easy to stitch with AutoPanoGiga from Kolor.

The VR Drive has individual modes: the quality and speed mode decide the overall behaviour. "Quality" stops and shoots on each position, which results in perfect photos each step. "Speed" turns the camera around the x and y axes and continually takes photos as fast as possible. That's good for crowded places or fast changing weather conditions. There are also two additional modes called "turntable" and "video" but they are not that interesting for us so we didn't select them. They can be added afterwards with a firmware update. The two modes (quality and speed) are split into cylindrical, spherical and manual. "Cylindrical" can be used for hemispherical HDR panoramas. "Spherical" - you guessed it - must be used for spherical HDRI panoramas. "Manual" can be used for gigapixel panoramas. I will not get into details for the rest of the settings of the VR Drive.

One of the first HDRIsOne of the first HDRI panoramas made with VR Drive

More information and reports about the VR Drive coming soon! It's such a great tool! Yes

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