xRez’s first gigapixel shoot was performed in January ‘05 outside Lone Pine, CA in the shadow of Mount Whitney in the eastern Sierra Nevada. A recent storm provided a light dusting of snow on the Alabama Hills, accentuating the rich detail present on the desert floor. In the early twilight, we quickly acended a rocky chute in the Alabama Hills that was scouted out the night before. Gaining a wide panorama of the entire Sierra range, we utilized Peace River Studio’s PixOrb motion control head to spherically capture 277 images shot on a Canon 1Ds and 100mm lens. A deep, cloudless sky provided challenges to stitch, but created a beautiful arc across the range. A time-lapse sequence was also shot of the swirling mists raking across Mount Whitney, providing a base for 3d camera projection in Maya of a moving sequence that would be difficult to photograph. Working also in Maya, a massive DEM displacement was made to re-create the entire range in 3d. Unifying the geometry with the gigapixel image, studies were made of flooding the basin and re-weathering the range w/ cast shadows and voxel clouds interacting w/ the peaks. Lastly, a high resolution HDR spherical panorama was captured in the rock chute, containing rich warm and cool hues for 3d rendering studies.

Team Members: Eric Hanson, Greg Downing, Ron Shirley.