From the course: Creating 360-Degree Panoramas and Interactive Tours

Cubical projection

From the course: Creating 360-Degree Panoramas and Interactive Tours

Start my 1-month free trial

Cubical projection

“

- The cubical projection. Somewhat similar to the spherical, in that, you're in the middle of something, in the middle of a sphere, now we're in the middle of a cube. - Now this is a bit like being inside of a room. I imagine a lot of times for things like real estate, this might be a common method, right? - Well, it depends on what the client wants. From the photographer's point of view, the cubical projection has a few uses. A lot of times the client wants that as their final result, and that's probably for people who are going to add it to a 3D creation or something like that. - I've seen that this is actually used in solutions like Adobe's DPS Solution for e-publishing in digital magazines. They prefer the cubical format, but you could convert between formats too, right? - You can, you can, and that's really common. For example, a lot of times, we want to work on the floor because there's a tripod in the way, and we want to retouch the floor, so converting into cubes is a great way to get a really direct look at the floor. And also, the cubical projection has really zero distortions at the poles, that so to speak, so that's at the ceiling and the middle of the floor. The spherical projection can get wrapped, and sometimes you'll see little distortion, and that's why those clients want that delivery method. - Now, cubical requires a little bit more work on the post-production side though, and you really are stepping up to some of the higher end tools to make this. Tools like Photoshop and Lightroom don't support cubical projection methods, but you could take a tool like Photoshop or Lightroom, do your basic work, and then hand it off to another conversion utility, right? - Right, right, there's software out there that only does conversions, as a matter of fact. And there's some of those software that is for other uses, but it includes that. - So the cubical method is most common when you are dealing with just a projection that needs to have minimal distortion, and you want the ability to look around, particularly looking at the ceiling or looking at the floor. And you want to pay particular attention to having excessive details in those areas. Now this does add some extra challenges, because obviously, cameras don't levitate, so when that happens, Ron, it's really a trip through Photoshop? Or what do you use to get rid of the tripod? - There are a few ways to do that, and one of the tried and true ways is to get a look right down at the floor and just retouch that little center piece. You can also capture an image and stitch that in as part of the image, and you can also cover it with something like a tripod cap, a logo of the client, a logo of yourself. - There we go, so the cubical method is our last method of the three as we take a look at some of the post-production techniques in workflows later on in this course, you'll see all of these come back to life, but it's important that you have a familiarity with these. Now, the last thing to discuss, before we start getting into equipment, is some of the resolution requirements. This might affect the camera that you choose, as well as what outputs are going to be available to you as you move through your workflow.

Contents