Credit:
NASA / GSFC: NASA gave a special Science On a Sphere (SOS)® demonstration to HM Elizabeth II, Queen of England and her husband, HRH Prince Phillip, the Duke of Edinburgh, and other members of the Royal Family on Tuesday, May 8, 2007. There's a growing number of SOS installations throughout the world used to teach and inspire a wide range of audiences.
Howdy Blender Gurus,
The Space Foundation (
www.SpaceFoundation.org) just received a generous donation and is going to install Science on a Sphere as part of a new science center. As a web developer/designer there I'm playing with the ECE format and attempting to create custom branded content, perhaps a nice disco ball to start (or maybe even a death star!).
Here's the exact type of final product I'm trying to create that is used by the SOS software, an equidistant cylindrical equatorial (ECE) projection:
Check out the animated video
here, and
here is what it looks like projected on a virtual globe. Ott Planetarium created this animation using Blender combined with Hugin panorama stitching software. My guess is that a wide angle camera was placed in the center of a UV sphere with a "tube" projected ECE image texture on the sphere and some text on a band in 3D space within the sphere. Perhaps the camera renders frames at multiple angles which then gets stitched together in Hugin, one set/frame at a time (ouch, but cool end result).
In my initial attempts to export full 360 degree panoramas from Blender, I found
this post with some tips pointing to the need for added stitching softare. It looks like full 180 degree vertical rendering is not possible (max of 173 degrees mentioned from some other online source). I also read somewhere that panoramas are not equidistant.
Wouldn't it be amazingly awesome to be able to render these ECE images directly from Blender? You should help make this happen, for science!
Best regards,
Chris
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I long for 360 equidistant cylindrical equatorial projection