Autodesk Stitcher Unlimited

Features

Fully Automatic Process

With an automatic process, Autodesk® Stitcher™ Unlimited panorama stitching software enables professional photographers, multimedia artists, and photography enthusiasts to create panoramas from overlapping pictures shot from a single point of view. Not only does Stitcher Unlimited automate the panoramic stitching process, it delivers automatic alignment and color correction.

Image and Lens Support

Support for Spheres
Stitch together a variety of images, from rectilinear to fish-eye to create fully spherical panoramas—up to 360 degrees horizontal by 180 degrees vertical.

Fish-Eye Lens Support
Import as few as two or three images and obtain a digital panorama in about the same amount of time it took to shoot the photos. Using the Double Shot feature you can assemble two images acquired in opposite directions using a fish-eye lens with a field of view larger than 180 degrees to quickly create a digital panorama covering the whole viewing sphere in only 2 minutes. Stitcher Unlimited panorama stitching software also takes into account the specific distortion parameters of the Sunex® fish-eye lens.

Automatic Lens Detection
Based on properties of the image, Autodesk Stitcher Unlimited detects the type of lens used to take a photo, including lens properties such as aperture and focal length. It then uses this information to produce high-quality results.

Panorama Import
Existing panoramas can be imported into Stitcher Unlimited 2009 for modification (for example, to make a spherical panorama a QuickTime VR panorama).

Image-Based Lighting Support

Support for EXR and HDR
Autodesk Stitcher Unlimited supports OpenEXR® and radiance RGB HDR, two file formats that contain information coded in 16 or 32 bits per channel, for high dynamic range imagery. You can load bracketed LDR (low dynamic range) images to stack them to create HDR (high dynamic range) images or tone mapped images. Stitcher can also import existing HDR images, stitch each picture in 32 bits, and enable you to adjust the lighting in the viewport in real time. The panorama can then be exported directly in 32 bits to a 3D software package.

Environment Map Support
HDR panoramic images can be used to create sophisticated environment maps that can then be exported to Autodesk® Mudbox™ digital sculpting and texture painting software, Autodesk® 3ds Max®, or Autodesk® Maya® 3D modeling and animation software.

Web Publishing Support

QuickTime VR Hotspot Support
Create Apple® QuickTime® VR (QTVR) application program hotspots and links integrated within a panorama that reference another panorama, allowing the end user to move from one virtual location to another. Define any number of hotspots of any shape, including arrows placed on doors, windows, and other openings.

Supported Web Formats
Stitcher Unlimited 2009 supports embedded publishing formats—Apple QuickTime VR, Adobe® Flash®, or Java™ players—through the ImmerVision™ Panoramas (IVP) file format. It also supports global positioning system (GPS) data of the panorama, which can be specified in files saved in KML format for the Google Earth™ mapping service. You can also create HTML pages to display panoramas directly in a web browser.

GPU Acceleration

Preview Renders
Autodesk Stitcher Unlimited is optimized to take advantage of graphics card GPUs (graphics processing units) for fast preview rendering in the main viewport.

Rendering Productivity
The GPU accelerator also speeds final renders, reducing render times by as much as 30 percent.

Touch-up and Photoshop Interoperability

Image Retouching
The Stencil toolset facilitates artifact removal (moving objects in the overlapping regions) as well as the correction of anomalies such as ghosting and lens flare. The image can also be exported to Adobe® Photoshop® software for retouching.

Tripod Cap
The tripod cap feature provides a user-specified tripod cap with automatic alignment so you can hide the tripod at the bottom of the image. You can choose one of your own images or use the included tripod-cap image. The image, which can be a TIFF with an alpha mask, will be positioned at the bottom of the current 3D view and oriented in the direction of the 3D view.

Adobe Photoshop Support
Stitcher Unlimited 2009 provides interoperability with Adobe Photoshop image-editing software—supporting the import of images with their masks and the export of the stitched panorama with blending masks for highly precise image touch-up.

Smart Blend
The software supports multiple blending, sharpening and interpolation methods, including “Smart Blend.”

Rendering

Crop Tool
The Crop Tool (Render Area), which can be used to define a render zone, is now available in full-screen mode—creating a very fast, efficient workflow.

Choice of Panorama Projection
Several projection modes are available for panoramic pictures: flat (as seen in the preview window), spherical, cylindrical, or cubical (6 faces of a cube).

Rendering with Templates
Panoramas can be rendered with HTML templates, streamlining the review and publishing processes.

Movies
Movies can be created by rotating or zooming a virtual camera around the central point of the panorama. A timeline editor enables you to add, remove, or edit key frames. Movies can be rendered at a user-defined resolution or frame rate and output to AVI or MOV format using any available codec.

User Interface and Workflow

Five-step Workflow
A five-step workflow and automatic engine make it very easy to learn and use Stitcher Unlimited 2009. The workflow consists of image import, stitching, alignment, touch-up, and rendering.

Display
A full 3D viewport allows you to place yourself at the center of the panoramic view. For those more comfortable working in 2D, a full screen 2D view is also supported, and you can move between the 3D and 2D views in one click. The productivity-enhancing Stitcher Unlimited user interface remains the same no matter which of the two views the user selects.

Redesigned User Interface
Stitcher Unlimited employs a highly intuitive user interface that enables you to become productive in as little as one hour. The look and feel of Autodesk Stitcher Unlimited has been recently improved through the addition of new icons and a new palette to manage thumbnails more efficiently.

Printing

Large Format Printing
Stitcher Unlimited 2009 panorama software enables photographers to produce large-sized panoramic prints.

Print Output
Artists can output to a variety of image formats, with support for adjustable parameters.