Monday, February 22, 2016

Tiny Spherical Worlds

My First World (Polar panorama)
Look! A river has been turned
 into a Spherical Pano!
So. See the title? See it? Smell it? Taste it? (No you can't. This is a computer.) We are making entire WORLDS! Ha! But there are no ordinary every-day planets, these are PHOTO WORLDS! Think of it like a panorama, but then it's made to look like a planet. There are examples all over this post. So, these worlds are composite images. What's a composite image you ask? It's an image made from several different photos. You may be wondering, "But Linden, why would you want a composite image? Isn't one photo enough? If you want a bigger photo, why can't you just use the panorama button on your phone? Isn't a composite image just more work?" And to that I answer, um, (What can I answer first?) About panoramas, yeah... they're composite images too. I know, I know, groundbreaking stuff here. Probably just went over your head. And the point of a composite image is to make several photos into an image beyond the limitations of a camera. No camera could make one of these photos into a tiny world. No sir. With composite images, you have a lot more customization freedom. Composite images do take more work then just a photo though, but that much is obvious.

I am the ruler of this world I created...
So, there are two types of these worlds. Polar and spherical. They may sound the same, and for the most part, they are. Only one step makes them different, but the outcomes are shockingly different. A polar panorama looks like a tiny globe that you could fit in your hand, but a spherical panorama looks kind of like the sky is a black hole sucking in everything from every angle. either way, they're both really cool. The one step that separates them is flipping the image upside-down before you use the tool to make it polar or spherical. It kinda inverses the sky and ground. So, in a polar panorama, the ground is in the center, but in a spherical panorama, the sky is in the center with the ground surrounding it. I think they look REALLY cool.

(This is really trippy...)
So, these worlds, they look (mostly) pretty real huh? No? Well, then, I'll explain to you why they look so spectacularly realistic! So, they look like this for several reasons. At first, there was a large line going straight through the worlds. That looks pretty dubious, so it had to be fixed. It took some serious edits to get rid of it. And by serious edits, I of course mean the always-handy stamp tool. Little bit of stamps here, little bit there, a ton of stamps there, change place where you stamp, stamp some more, and boom! Line erased! There may be a bit of traces of the line there, but it otherwise (totally) works! I will admit, I'm not the BEST editor, but that doesn't stop me from trying! Another thing that makes them look as real as an egg-salad sandwich, is in the portrait shots, the angle in which the portraits were taken. The portraits were then skewed to fit more, and had an epic shadow added to them! Pretty realistic huh?


SO many new planets need to be added to the science textbooks now,
-Linden