More Vistas!
For some reason everybody wants panoramas from Azshara, an area in World of Wacraft that by player consensus is exceptionally pretty. I’m very sorry to say that “pretty” doesn’t always translate to “photogenic”.
Let’s move on from that sad note – I’m having a ton of fun capturing insanely huge panoramas in all areas of the game. The header image above is the entire Outland zone of Halaa. Fifty images, captured at 2048×1536 in lossless [[Truevision TGA]] format. After this batch I have another ten of so panoramas to go up and online, mostly from the Outland and Northrend. I’ve been sequentially working my way up to ever-bigger scenes.
How did I capture at these magical sizes? 091 Labs.
After mentioning my desire for a more powerful workstation to capture panoramas on (and also the cutting-edge video card gifted to me by Mr. Joshua and Mrs. Jennifer Tidmore of Dallas, Texas, U.S.A.), Matthew jumped in to help me assemble one. Motherboard, case, power supply and hard disk. On top of this hardware monster are running a Windows 7 and Ubuntu 10.04 dual-boot. We can conceivably handle almost all of the light media work you might expect at somewhere like 091 Labs:
- Still image editing. I’ve transferred my Hugin->Gimp->Mogrify workflow from my laptop, although the screen real estate and underlying performance have jumped hugely. I’m down from (up to) three hours to finding control points in a stitch to about 15-30 minutes for a big scene.
- Video and audio editing. I believe I saw somebody stream editing a video under Windows? I can build a time-lapse screencast in h.264 format and append an MP3 soundtrack in less than five minutes. Down from 20 or 30.
- 3D video game creation. Matthew has been very happily cracking away at the Unreal SDK.
- Video games. Don’t share this with anyody, but I have iWintergrasp on my iPod. And Matthew runs Portal when nobody is looking.
Don’t ask, don’t tell
Shout-outs to those who gave me suggestions:
Illista of The Scryers server for Utgarde Keep.
Planeshaper of the Blackhand server, Sunderstruck of the Scarlet Crusade server, and Punchbuggey of the Kel’Thuzad server for Nagrand.
Categorised as: awesome, photography, world of warcraft