Stitching Spherical HDR Panoramas in NukeX with CaraVR

In this video we take an in-depth look at using the CaraVR toolset in NukeX 12.0+ for stitching spherical HDR panoramas.

We talk about
- Advantages of stitching in Nuke vs alternatives like PTGui and AutoPanoGiga
- Blending multiple bracketed exposures into a single hdr image
- Calibrating color and exposure
- Using the C_CameraSolver node to solve our camera rig, including an in-depth rundown on creating manual feature matches, and a manual approach for getting a solve
- Fixing alignment, ghosting and blending artifacts
- Using C_SphericalTransform to paint out unwanted objects in frame
- Using Blender, we'll test out our final HDR to see how it works!

Links

Chapters
00:00 - Bad joke
00:32 - Summary of events
01:28 - What is an HDR?
03:06 - Brief tangent into raw image debayer with RawTherapee
05:06 - Why use Nuke for HDR Stitching?
07:55 - Apocalypse from the West
08:38 - Combining bracketed exposures into an HDR image
17:39 - ExposureBlend tool
19:48 - Calibrating exposure
22:56 - Fix alignement issue
25:53 - Intro to CaraVR toolset
26:38 - Solving our rig with C_CameraSolver
33:16 - Straighten horizon
34:05 - Creating manual feature matches
38:28 - Set mask shape
40:02 - C_Stitcher to warp and blend panorama
41:00 - Fix stitching artifacts by tweaking masking
41:56 - Fix ghosting artifacts by removing areas of each view
45:00 - Remove areas from HDR blend to reduce motionblur artifacts
50:36 - Write out a cache of the stitch before paint
52:31 - Paint out camera shadow
59:18 - Color calibration with a Macbeth Colorchecker
01:02:40 - Lighting a scene in Blender
01:06:12 - Thanks and The End
01:06:48 - Bonus Round! Manual alignment if nothing else works

[marcangele]

hey jed,
thanks a lot for the amazing tutorial and the tools you shared!

i watched also your other tutorials and there are great. so, please keep uploading videos!
definitely it would be great to see a tutorial about debayering.

[conradallan]

You get my upvote just for that hilariously great intro.

[PeterJansen]

Damn. Thank you. I didn't need to know this today, but I damn well learnt it today.

[anniep]

Radio-announcer mode activated. rofl. Amazing content, caught myself staying for the entire video though I meant to finish it later. Love the chapters breakdown.

[boogiekimx]

Thanks for the tutorial keep these coming.

[SebastianLarsen]

I get "strptime() argument 1 must be str, not None" when I hit group - What am I doing wrong?

[ackila]

Hi Jed
Thanks a lot for your detailed tutorial on how to stich spherical HDRs in Cara VR. It's been very helpful to me. Also very nice to have a workflow within nuke without the need of using lots of different software packages. Makes things quite a bit easier.

Do you think it would be possible go over your process of debayering raw images to scene linear in more detail. I am also on Linux but I am currently struggling to get your debayer / RawTherapee workflow to work properly.

[bidsandmen]

I do not have a node MergeDivide (17.09 in lesson). Tell me what to do?

[shaocaholica]

Thanks for this. What are your thoughts on using Lightroom for processing the raws? I know its Win/Mac only but I already have that anyway. It has very good chromatic fringing correction. If you export as DNG those should be in linear space as well, already debayered and readable in Nuke.

[joelswfx]

Hey Jed, those gizmos that you wrote (you used 2 of them) how can I obtain those gizmos?)