Tuesday 14 September 2010

Spherical Projection

An office move has uncovered our old Elumens Vision Station, which sat running no more than the Elumens demonstration movies and a copy of EventScope for most of its life as no-one ever really got to grips with its peculiarities. A quick investigation revealed Elumens' TrueFrame software still installed.  The challenge was obvious, can CryENGINE be persuaded to generate spherically projected images for the VisionStation?  In the absence of SPI-API (Elumens are now long-defunct) which offered live conversion of Open-GL output I resorted to generating static images (four per spherical image) from a custom camera in Sandbox and stitching these together in TrueFrame. It works (as you can see) although the sky is a little flaky (possibly a misaligned camera; something to investigate).  However, the prospect of trying to produce animated output from CryENGINE, with limited Sandbox camera control and no native animated output, fills me with dread; something for a very rainy day...