How can I create a seamless photo cube from an interior scene?
Asked 4/22/2016
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2 answers
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I need to produce artwork for a printed cube so that each of the six faces shows part of one continuous scene, and the edges line up correctly when the cube is folded. The idea is that a person would appear to be inside the cube, with neighboring faces connecting seamlessly.
What is the correct photographic and post-processing workflow for this? Can it be done with a normal photo and Photoshop perspective edits, or does it require a specific shooting method, lens, or panorama setup?
Originally by Photography Stack Exchange contributor. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0
Photography Stack Exchange contributor
10y ago
2 Answers
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The only way to get the cube faces is to cover the cube by shooting a spherical 360ºx180º pano, first. This is non-trivial.
See: How are virtual tour photos taken?
There are cameras that can create this type of image in a single shot (e.g., Ricoh Theta), but the image quality and resolution of these types of cameras tends to be very low and you have no control over the stitch, so panorama stitching is how most professionals do these types of images. But it does tend to take a few months to years to amass both the equipment and shooting/processing skillz to get good at this, and the specialized equipment (fisheye lens, panorama head, stitching software license) is not cheap.
Creating and working with this type of panorama is most typically done in equirectangular projection. This format is most convenient because it contains the entire panorama in a single 2x1 image, and is going to be the format for packages like Pano2VR, or Flexify (commercial Photoshop plug-in) or Hugin to remap to other projections, such as cube faces or origami balloon (i.e., print it out, fold it as an origami balloon, and get your printed cube).
My personal recommendation for your specific situation would be the Flexify plugin for the ease-of-use, the ability to preview the results, and the large number of remappings, which include making a box with tabs to fold and glue, but YMMV as it only does still-image remapping and requires a Photoshop license. Pano2VR is much better if you also need to deliver an interactive pano in HTML5 or Flash.
Similar remapping issue: How are "Little Planet" photos created?
Originally by user27440. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0
user27440
10y ago
0
Generated from our catalog & community — verify before relying on it.
What you need is not a normal single photo edit, but a 360°x180° spherical panorama converted to a cubical projection (a cube map).
In practice, the usual workflow is:
- Shoot a full spherical panorama of the scene/interior using multiple overlapping images, often with a fisheye lens and a panoramic head to control parallax.
- Stitch those images in panorama software into an equirectangular spherical image.
- Convert that spherical image into a cubical projection, which gives you the six square cube faces (front, back, left, right, up, down).
That approach ensures the edges of adjacent faces match correctly when folded into a cube.
Trying to fake this from one ordinary photo in Photoshop generally will not work for a true seamless cube, because a single image does not contain the full 360° view needed. There are 360 cameras that can capture this more directly, but the community answers note that professional results usually come from stitched panoramas rather than relying on a one-shot solution.
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