Misadventures at 720nm

This time I’m going in for a fisheye-chic of Ironforge and Stormwind:

All from the Outland, today:

Auchinduon, Nagrand (again) and Terokkar Forest.

For some reason everybody wants panoramas from Azshara, an area in World of Wacraft that by player consensus is exceptionally pretty. I’m very sorry to say that “pretty” doesn’t always translate to “photogenic”.

Let’s move on from that sad note – I’m having a ton of fun capturing insanely huge panoramas in all areas of the game. The header image above is the entire Outland zone of Halaa. Fifty images, captured at 2048×1536 in lossless Truevision TGA format. After this batch I have another ten of so panoramas to go up and online, mostly from the Outland and Northrend. I’ve been sequentially working my way up to ever-bigger scenes.

How did I capture at these magical sizes? 091 Labs.

After mentioning my desire for a more powerful workstation to capture panoramas on (and also the cutting-edge video card gifted to me by Mr. Joshua and Mrs. Jennifer Tidmore of Dallas, Texas, U.S.A.), Matthew jumped in to help me assemble one. Motherboard, case, power supply and hard disk. On top of this hardware monster are running a Windows 7 and Ubuntu 10.04 dual-boot. We can conceivably handle almost all of the light media work you might expect at somewhere like 091 Labs:

• Still image editing. I’ve transferred my Hugin->Gimp->Mogrify workflow from my laptop, although the screen real estate and underlying performance have jumped hugely. I’m down from (up to) three hours to finding control points in a stitch to about 15-30 minutes for a big scene.
• Video and audio editing. I believe I saw somebody stream editing a video under Windows? I can build a time-lapse screencast in h.264 format and append an MP3 soundtrack in less than five minutes. Down from 20 or 30.
• 3D video game creation. Matthew has been very happily cracking away at the Unreal SDK.
• Video games. Don’t share this with anyody, but I have iWintergrasp on my iPod. And Matthew runs Portal when nobody is looking.

  Don’t ask, don’t tell

Shout-outs to those who gave me suggestions:

Illista of The Scryers server for Utgarde Keep.
Planeshaper of the Blackhand server, Sunderstruck of the Scarlet Crusade server, and Punchbuggey of the Kel’Thuzad server for Nagrand.

I finally finished out the rest of this series over the course of this afternoon:

As places go in World of Warcraft, Kharanos in the Dun Morogh zone has a special place in my heart. My very first character was a Gnome Warlock, and it was the very first town I stopped in in the game. My first trainer. Consider that I exclusively play as Gnomes on the Alliance side of the game, I have been here a lot through the years. In honour of this fact, tonight I set out to capture a series of panoramas in and around the town. My first scene from this series of six images is a 360°x180° panorama taken from the centre of the Thunderbrew Distillery, that hub of ale-fuelled debauchery and questing.

I’ve been itching do something at least quasi-photography related, but I still have no desire to go and pick my camera to do so. Instead I went and resubscribed to World of Warcraft for the purpose of capturing panoramic vistas from the video game. Dalaran? Netbook? Graphics on high? Fuckin’ murder, guvn’r.

As a bonus to any open source fans here, these images were entirely processed using open-source tools: Hugin, The Gimp, and Imagemagick

I’ve been happy to discover that as well as the Gimp maturing, so has Hugin (and it’s suite of tools) since I last used it. No more nightmares in having to pick out control points by hand because autopano was being crotchety. I even made a wee little screencast to go along with this; I’ll put it up later.

Gimp users: Is there any easy way to change the hardness of brushes on the fly, short of changing to a different brush?

I’ve tried to take a few panoramas within Northrend…in World of Warcraft, but the going has been very slow due to some very real technical hurdles – low (1024×600) screen resolution, and a processor that simply wasn’t intended for intensive graphics and photo post-processing needed to create them. Wrestling with 5 FPS and waiting for more than hour for the images to compile is tedious tedious tedious.

Tweaking after stitching is minimal – I boost saturation, contrast and brightness slightly, otherwise the images will tend to look a little dull on screen.

Send your donations for a Mac Pro to…

Gun’drak

From WoWWiki:

This is the Drakkari capital, the only large city in Zul