Panorama of Interior of A Teapot

April fool: could you cook with my tureen?
Let’s have a look at the object movie (QTVR) or (Flash) of a near perfect cylindrical subject: that of a coffee-pot for instance. However there are some protrusions that spread out from the outer surface of the cylinder: a large handle and a spout…

The handles are not so big and there is no spout at all on the tureen that is shown on the picture below:

A very popular and classical kitchen utensil from the 1970’s: from the series “Acapulco” byVilleroy and Boch (Luxemburg)…

Because the shape of the tureen is nearly a pure cylindrical body we shall demonstrate that it’s possible to present it in a very different way;-)

Let’s put the utensil (carefully centered) on a turning round table for making object movie (flash or QTVR). We may fix the table on top of the R-D12 or the R-D16 rotator from Nodal Ninja. The horizontal plane is adjusted and controlled accurately by means of a spirit level. A camera with a long telephoto lens is placed on a tripod some distance away from the object at precisely the same horizontal level in order to get the tureen slightly cropped in the frame of the picture. For example with a 300 mm on a FF EOS 5D camera at a distance of about two meters, we can shoot 48 images of the tureen each of them angularly separated by 7.5 degrees. See below:

This is one of the 48 images. The red part shall eventually used for stitching in the following steps.

Instead of inputing these images in a standard program to make an object movie (e.g. Object2VR) as one would normally do at this point, let’s input them in a panorama stitching software e.g. PTGui Pro.

The Yaw data in the Image Parameters table shall be set at 7.5 degrees interval to cover the whole 360 degrees of the panorama in equirectangular projection.Yaw values( associated with p= t= zero) shall shall stay such until the end of the process.

Three contiguous images amongst the 48 are affected with control points.Then these only three images are aligned and optimized by using all parameters. This is done simultaneously with a carefull cropping of the images (such as shown in red above) and giving manually a FOV value to the rectlinear cropped image until the otpimization is” very good.” All the remaining images are then affected with the same parameters (except the yaw of course).

Fine adjustment of the final FOV and other parameters shall be done now by looking at the Panorama Editor until the overlapping of the images is satisfactory. The blending helps in perfecting the result…

Two shots of the bottom of the tureen and of the cover are then added to the other images. The cover shot looks like this:

In red: the cropping to be done in the PTGui Crop Tab window.

They are described to PTGui as specifically “Circular” and the round parts are cropped precisely in the Crop tab window. The parameters for FOV, Yaw, Roll and Pitch of these two cropped circular images are tweaked manually in the Images Parameters table until they fit perfectly at their respective expected location in the Panorama Editor: i.e. the cover at the Zenith and the bottom at the Nadir.

The output panorama can then be converted into QTVR for instance.

Output panorama:
Here it is as a QTVR panorama or here as a Flash panorama.

Amazing isn’t it? Could you cook in this tureen?

Be careful though as the handles may be very hot!