Digital Artform

Here's image number 1.

Image 1 is a rendered view of a (rather garish) 3D scene. In this example I used a default Maya camera with the lens set to 20 mm.

Here's image 2.

Image 2 is a another rendered view of the same scene, only this time the camera was rotated -75 degrees around the Y-axis.

I allowed a little overlap in the images, so that you could better see the "hookup" between the two. That funny little tilted "egg" on the far right of image 1 is the same object as the one on the far left of image 2.

We're ready. Let's begin:

Step 1
Model a plane with the same aspect ratio as that of image 1 and map image 1 onto the plane.

Make the plane any size you wish, but place it as far from the camera as is necessary to have the plane exactly fill frame.

Step 2
Make a second plane to the same specs and make sure that it, too, fills the frame. Map image 2 onto plane 2.

Step 3
Now rotate plane 2 away from plane 1 in the exact same way that camera 2 was rotated away from camera 1 when the original images were made.

In this example, image 2 was rendered after a -75 degree pan away from image 1, therefore you must y-rotate plane 2 those same -75 degrees away from plane 1.

Congratulations. You're done.

No stitching needed. No cylindrical maps needed. No spherical maps needed. No kidding. You are absolutely done.

Here's the setup as seen from a "God's eye view." The two images are mapped onto flat planes. The flat planes are slammed right through each other. The corner between the two planes is a sharp angle. When you view the two planes from the right place, none of those details matters.

Leave the "God's eye view" and go back down to the place where the planes fill frame. See for yourself what a pan across those two planes looks like:

In this animation, I tinted the two planes two different shades of color so that you can see where one ends and the other begins. Notice how the lines and edges flow seamlessly from one image to the other. From this special place, the images are not "broken" across the corner between the two walls at all.

In this animation I used the two images in their untinted form, and I zoomed in a bit before panning across the two planes in order to hide the corner. Now the illusion is perfect.

That's all there is to it.

If you take care to even out the lighting and tweak any lens distortion, you can do this exact same technique using live action photos instead of rendered CG images.

... okay, want to see one more image worked in? How about one at a crazier angle?

Here's a third image. It was rendered with the camera at angles 10, -30, and -20 around the X-, Y-, and Z-axes.

That means image 3 goes on card 3, and card 3 gets the same crazy X, Y, and Z rotations.

When you look at this trio of cards through the correct camera, all of the textures on them align in seamless perfection.

...I purposely tinted card 3 a little bit and lowered the focal length of the rendering camera a bit so that you could more easily see where card 3 begins and ends and interpenetrates the other two cards. If I were to remove the tint and zoom in a bit, the seamless illusion across all three cards would again be perfect.

Feel free to play around with this yourself.

There are two Maya scene files that are independent of each other.

One renders the environment into the still images you'll need.
(Camera1 renders frame 1 and Camera 2 renders frame 2)

environment.mb

The other maps those still images onto cards and pans across the cards to create the moving panoramic background.

viewPlanes.mb

The scenes files above are Maya 6 files. To keep sizes small, I have used only procedural textures in environment.mb It's your job to render the two images from environment.mb using camera1 and camera2, and to attach the rendered images to the cards in viewPlanes.mb by editing the "file" nodes accordingly.

And finally...

...this is a "nodal point pan and tilt" shot. Rotate the cameras all you want (as if they were on tripods). If you translate the cameras (as if they were on dollys) you'll start to break the effectiveness of the illusion.