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The National Museum of the US Air Force provides spherical panoramas of the cockpits of many of their aircraft. I am especially interested in the ones of the cockpit of the XB-70 at http://www.nmusafvirtualtour.com/cockpits/RD_tour/RD-9.html . There are two panoramas, taken from the pilot and copilot seats, from the same height. The distance between the seats is known. Is it possible to construct a rough 3D model of the cockpit based on these panoramas using some existing software? I mean a model that would give a close approximation of the locations of some points in the cockpit, not something that would be directly usable as an actual 3D model for VR or some such. Any pointers to such software?

(Downloading the individual photos that the panorama consists of, or taking screenshots of the panoramas as rendered in a web browser, and massaging them into whatever input format such software needs is then another problem.)

tml
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  • Hi :). Blender definitely can't do photogrammetry from photos. But with a flat image like this you could do some cool projection on geometry. – jachym michal Feb 12 '22 at 19:47
  • Yeah I am not as such expecting Blender to do this work, but as the end result (measurements of the cockpit) will be used when creating the 3D mode in Blender I thought there is perhaps enough a connection to make the question relevant here. But yeah, maybe not. – tml Feb 12 '22 at 20:04
  • Oh it is relevant :). You could do camera matching using FSpy and then import it into Blender for modeling and projection. Kinda finicky but very much possible. – jachym michal Feb 12 '22 at 20:16
  • @vklidu Been searching for that answer about a month ago with no luck :)). Bookmarked now. cheers ;) – jachym michal Feb 12 '22 at 21:46
  • @vklidu Not really, as I don't even have an equirectangular projection of the panorama. But yeah, I would first have to create a such. Let's see. – tml Feb 12 '22 at 22:45
  • @vklidu But that indeed gives me an ideas of what I could try to approach the problem differently: Take screenshots of the 360 panorama in various directions, and then position those as reference images around the camera position in Blender, and then position the camera in Blender there, too, and check that some key points of the objects in Blender match the corresponding points in the reference images. Repeat this for the position of the other 360 panorama. Adjust positions of objects as necessary in Blender so that they are correctly located from both viewpoints. – tml Feb 12 '22 at 22:49
  • Thanks @vklidu for investigating, I now think I will be able to get something useful out of this. The software that is used to display the panorama is something called "krpano" (from krpano.com) and there is an XML file with parameters, and its contents is documented, etc. – tml Feb 13 '22 at 09:31
  • @tml if you found solution related to blender workflow to reconstruct images let me know Im interested ... here XB-70 cube if you will find it usefull to continue in processing :) Image files were nicely structured (just for some reason I wasnt able to download data again from site).Data contained also very small preview of texture (strip easy to apply a cube, but too lowres). – vklidu Feb 13 '22 at 18:49
  • Thanks @vklidu , that textured cube matches what I constructed myself, too. I probably will continue by writing some small helper program that takes as input the texture coordinates (l,r,u,d,f,b + x + y) of some recognisable point in the pilot and co-pilot cube images, and as the camera positions are known (the pilot is at 22 inches to the left of the aircraft centreline and the co-pilot correspondingly to the right), calculates the location of the closest matching point in 3D space (relative to the camera positions). – tml Feb 14 '22 at 07:50
  • But as such I don't have any solution that would be completely inside Blender, no. – tml Feb 14 '22 at 07:50
  • OK :) thanks for info. I deleted my previous comments since chatting is not allowed here. – vklidu Feb 14 '22 at 08:48

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