Make fancy looking things without going broke buying Creative Cloud.

By now, you’ve probably seen a lot of those fancy looking panoramas, 3D photospheres, or images that look like Tiny Planets / a Super Mario Galaxy level / King Kai’s Planet.
The way this is done is similar to how NVIDIA Ansel creates 360 pictures, but isn’t automated (yet…).

You’ll need:
Microsoft Research’s Image Composite Editor[research.microsoft.com] (ICE)
A first-person camera

You’ll want:
Image Editing Software ( PaintdotNET [www.getpaint.net] or FastStone Image Viewer[www.faststone.org] are my go-to)
Access to a Dedicated Capture Mode – OR – the ability to use Time-stop, No HUD, No First Person Player Model, FOV control, and Free cam/No Clip.

Have a look through your library, and find a game where you’ve got access to a First-Person camera. While any FPS will work here, many other games have these hidden away as a debug camera. For instance, XCOM2 and ABZÛ have these, despite not being first-person games. Third-Person cameras won’t work with this method, since the “pivot point” of the camera is out in the scene, rather than at the “lens” of the camera. We'll use ABZÛ throughout this tutorial, and DeadEndThrills excellent CheatEngine Table.

If a game has a dedicated Capture Mode (Mad Max , Shadow Warrior 2, or anything that has NVIDIA Ansel), use this.

If the game doesn’t have a dedicated capture mode, see if you can make one with the console (Things like Noclip, Time-stop, Disabling HUD), using GeDoSaTo[blog.metaclassofnil.com] to get rid of HUD items or great big things that say “PAUSED” in the middle of the screen, or using Cheat Engine[www.cheatengine.org] to take control of the camera when I shouldn’t. I tend to check things like DeadEndThrills[deadendthrills.com] or PCGamingWiki[pcgamingwiki.com] for an idea of what I’ve got available to work with.

If the game doesn’t have either of these, don’t worry! This process will still work, you’ll just have a few extra steps (These are covered in the Tips section).

Image quality is the highest priority when making these things. We’re not trying to be playable, we’re after capturing the mood of the environment. That said, I tend to turn off post-processing effects that add things like dirt or scratches to the lens, such as the psuedo Bokeh[en.wikipedia.org] effect in XCOM2, but that’s up to you.
On FOV and Capture Resolution: Wider angles will make the capturing process *much* faster at the expensive of image quality, but tighter FOV will give you more environmental detail (Most games don’t include Perspective Distortion[en.wikipedia.org], so it’s like cruddy version of supersampling[en.wikipedia.org] that won’t turn your GPU into molten slag). Our software can do Gigapixel resolution panoramas if you’ve got the RAM (and ability to open the final image), but for most games, you’ll have massively diminishing returns for FOVs below 80. You may also note that I didn’t mention the resolution of your screenshots. While this is normally a big deal in screenshots, higher resolutions have diminishing returns when you’re making panoramas this way. Worry about getting the smallest object you care about in the scene looking good, rather than trying to force as many pixels as you can into each shot. Feel free to use GeDoSaTo to capture at 16K if you want, but it probably won’t be worth the effort / fire hazard.

With your scene all set up, start taking screenshots in all directions. I like to start at the horizon, do a 360 degree (Azimuth, in Spherical Coordinates[mathworld.wolfram.com]) sweep, capturing about every 45 degrees for an FOV of 90 (i.e. take a shot, look at the objects at the edge of the screen, move the camera so those are now in the middle, take another shot.).

Once I’m back to the start, change the elevation (Altitude, in Spherical Coordinates[mathworld.wolfram.com]), and repeat this process until you’ve got a screenshot of every single direction.

If you’re not sure that you’ve got a shot, take an extra one. The more photos, the better (provided your scene isn’t moving).

When you’re reasonably satisfied that you’ve got everything, quit the game and look at the collection of screenshots you’ve got. Open Image Composite Editor (ICE), and drag-and-drop them into the main window. Once you’ve got them all in there, check that Camera Motion is set to AutoDetect, then click Next.

This will start the stitching process, where ICE does some quick optical object recognition, and finds a way to overlap as many of the images as it can. This can take a while, so go have a nice cuppa tea, a Bex, and a lie down (Don’t worry, it never takes more than 3 minutes on my machine, even with a few hundred images).

When the stitching is complete, you should see something like this:

The Spans 360 degree Horizontally and 180 degree Vertically underneath tells you that ICE was able to find enough information in all directions to recreate the entire scene.

Now comes the most important part: Choose a projection.

To Make a Planet: we select Stereographic, and set the Orientation to:
Roll 0 Degrees
Pitch -90 Degrees
Yaw 0 Degrees

If this works, you should have a little planet! You can adjust the shape of this using the mouse, but I tend just rotate the scene instead so I don’t introduce additional distortions.



[Alternatively, if you just want a fancy panorama like you see of GTA V or The Witcher 3 on Steam Community with several hundred likes: try another projection then just crop out the area you want. Easy Peasy Lemon Squeezy! YOUR WINNER!]

So, you’ve got your pretty pretty all set up, now it’s time to get it into a saveable format. Select Crop from up the top, and after the panorama is projected, you’ll have your scene again. Looking at the Width and Height, you’ll probably notice that the full image is a mite over 15000x15000 pixels.

That’s great and all, but a lot of programs will flat out refuse to deal with files this big. Also, there’s probably a lot of extra space around the interesting parts that you’ll want gone, or maybe missing bits of the sky if you didn’t get Zenith. If you’ve followed the guide and only rotated the planet scene, the middle of the planet will be the centre of the image, making auto-centering and cropping super easy. Here, a 10000x10000 pixel crop looks good to me, but this is down to personal taste.



My general advice is to see if 7500x7500 will contain everything of interest to your scene. Once you’re happy with the crop, hit Next and move on to Export.

I do two exports here. The first is a high quality PNG at 100% scale copy of the scene. I’ll then make a 95-100 Quality JPEG with a Width and Height between 4500-5500 pixels. This is to keep the image size under the 8MB that Steam requires, and to prevent Steam from throwing up additional errors (I’ve had a lot of problems getting it to accept images above 30 megapixels, but your experience may differ).



Alternatively, use a good image editor to downsample the PNG to something under 30 megapixels and below 8MB. I really like FastStone Image Editor for this, the Crop board is excellent.

Upload your JPEG to the Steam Community Hub / Flickr / Imgur / Tumblr /, give it a name, and feel the glow of adding something beautiful to this world.

Or just print it out and throw it out the window at a passing dog. That works too.

Sometimes ICE will get confused by a scene and fail to project properly. In this case, you can try importing the bare minimum number of images, as something in the scene might have moved or asset reuse in the game will have caused a problem. If this fails again, I often just recapture the scene.

ICE comes with a very basic Autocomplete function for filling in gaps in panoramas. If you notice Grey holes (or if the Autocrop button doesn’t select the whole image), these are missing bits. If they’re not in your scene when you crop at the end, you can ignore them, but otherwise you can try the (quite computationally intensive) Autocomplete system. This will produce variable results, but can work in a pinch. Otherwise, load up a dedicated image editor (Paint.NET or GIMP if you’re broke like me) and clean up the errors in that.

Everything ICE does, Adobe’s Creative Cloud can do. But ICE is free, extremely easy to use, doesn’t require an internet connection, and can run on any version of Windows newer than XP.

Get Steam to screenshot in PNG, and use these instead of the default JPEGs. Since ICE accepts PNGs as inputs, you can cut out bad parts of the inputs and leave them transparent.

The general rule of thumb: avoid scenes where you’ll have big objects 30 degrees above the horizon. Buildings or Mountains will distort like crazy, and you’ll have this weird bulbous mass that can look very weird. Sometimes trees will look ok though, so experiment and you should get a good idea.

The closer an object is to the camera, the greater the distortion. If you want an object to look relatively normal (Say, a car or a person), try to keep it at least 5 meters from the camera and within 15 degrees of the horizon. However, distortion on people can look *really good* if you’ve got a good eye for composition (See this GTAV shot by a very clever peep[www.flickr.com]).

Another rule of thumb is try to avoid putting anything too interesting directly underneath the camera. Keep this part of the scene relatively boring and go for more eye-catching detail around the horizon. If you’ve got something like a highlighted path in your scene, capturing the scene directly on top of the path doesn’t look as nice as being a few meters away.

Some games will have HUDs that you can’t turn off. In this case, crop out the HUD before stitching, and just take your screenshots a little closer together. Same goes for games with really strong Vignetting that can’t be disabled at all (Looking at you, Mass Effect 2).

There will be games where you’ve got no access to anything that makes capturing a scene easy (The Long Dark is my favourite example. There’s no console, subtle vignetting, no pause, and the player’s breathing makes little clouds in the middle of the screen). In these cases, I do my best to try and capture as quickly as possible. Things like moving clouds and horrible animals coming to gnaw on my guts will mostly be dealt with by ICE, or can be photoshopped out later. Or use it to turn one deer into a distributed herd. Up to you!

This technique will work in the real world, too. Camera + Tripod + the ability to edit out shadows = Good Times.

Worried about Perspective Distortion making everything look weird? ICE should be able to compensate for it in almost all cases, unless you’ve somehow turned your camera into a Duck eye. I’ve done a real-world shot with a 14mm fisheye lens, and ended up with a panorama that had no noticeable perspective effects on it with ICE.

Don’t worry about needing a powerful PC. I used to do this on my first gen i7 with 8GB of RAM and an ATi 5870 (“ Top of the line in ’09! ”), and got the same quality as I get with my NVIDIA GTX 1070 and 32GB of RAM. Image projection, stitching, and editing can be computationally intensive, but if you can run Steam on Windows, you can make pretties.

Here’s a link[www.dropbox.com] to the source materials I used to make this. You’ll notice there’s a hole at the top of the scene, but the Autocorrect can fix it for you if you want to use that. Try playing with a few projections to see how these things work without stressing about the capture process, but most of all, have fun trying this stuff!