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Introducing The Dome Master

This document introduces dome masters, which are circular 2D images used as input for full dome theater projections. Dome masters must be formatted to minimize distortion when projected onto the curved interior of a dome theater. They use an azimuthal equidistant projection to ensure equal areas in the dome master correspond to equal physical areas in the dome. Dome masters can be created by rendering a single fisheye image or by stitching together multiple orthographic renders of a scene. The orthographic approach is useful when fisheye rendering is not supported by 3D modeling software. Dome masters contain 180 degrees of view but theaters often use less, requiring portions of the dome master image to be discarded during projection setup.

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154 views3 pages

Introducing The Dome Master

This document introduces dome masters, which are circular 2D images used as input for full dome theater projections. Dome masters must be formatted to minimize distortion when projected onto the curved interior of a dome theater. They use an azimuthal equidistant projection to ensure equal areas in the dome master correspond to equal physical areas in the dome. Dome masters can be created by rendering a single fisheye image or by stitching together multiple orthographic renders of a scene. The orthographic approach is useful when fisheye rendering is not supported by 3D modeling software. Dome masters contain 180 degrees of view but theaters often use less, requiring portions of the dome master image to be discarded during projection setup.

Uploaded by

PabloJavierSantamaría
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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I

ntroducing
the dome master
u n d e r s ta n d i n g d o m e p ro j e c t i o n & c r e at i n g f u l l d o m e i m ag e s

. introduction .
defining the dome master........... 1
creating dome master images...... 2

Written by

kevin cain

tales of the maya skies


a chabot space and science center production. major funding provided by the national science foundation
maya skies supplemental materials created by insight - www.mayaskies.net

introducing the dome master


Full dome theaters range in size and technical implementation, but they all feature the kind of
hemispheric screen familiar to planetarium visitors. Full dome theater theaters share something
else: the format for the source images they project in the dome. These images are tondos,
circular 2D pictures commonly referred to as dome masters. While technical configurations for
dome displays change from system to system, to ensure compatibility across different systems
they all conveniently use dome masters as input. Heres one, showing a view of the jungle above
Chichen Itza, made during production for Tales of the Maya Skies:
To orient yourself, imagine that the image at right is
being projected in a dome theater. The center point of
the dome master will fall on the zenith point of the dome,
directly overhead. The circumference of the circle image
will define the horizon, or spring line, of the dome. (To
be more accurate, the circumference of a full dome image
defines the spring line for a 180 degree dome theater
with zero degrees of tilt. We will explore other common
dome configurations below.) The lower center third of
a dome master roughly equates to a domes sweet spot
the region that the audience can most easily see when
front-facing.

Dome Master view of


Chichen Itza.

Right away, youll notice a few important things about


the dome master above. First, while the content of the
dome master is circular, the image containing it is square.
When projected, only the circular area is processed and displayed; the remainder of the image is
usually left black and contains notes about the images.
Secondly, you might suspect that there is some
distortion in the above image. This hunch is right,
but the distortion present is intentionally computed.
Full dome theaters work by projecting twodimensional dome master images onto the threedimensional hemispheric surface of the venue, not
unlike the way a globe is made by mapping 2D
images onto a 3D sphere. In both cases, projecting
a two-dimensional map onto a three-dimensional
surface requires either a distorted map or a distorted
projection. Dome masters, then, appear distorted
but are formatted to minimize the distortion seen
by viewers in the dome.

The familiar Mercator


projection used for globes.

The usual mechanism used to map images on a globe is the familiar Mercator projection shown
above. For dome masters the projection type used is azimuthal equidistant projection, shown
below. Azimuthal equidistant projection creates a circular image in which equally spaced
concentric lines represent equal regions of the scene being imaged. This is an significant feature.

A dome master (left),


with its projection in dome
(right).

It is important that images projected in the dome do not appear to change scale in either of the
two image axes. Azimuthal equidistant projection ensures that equal swaths of a physical dome
are mapped to equal areas in a dome master. In the images above, note the even spacing of
concentric circles. Most common 180 degree fisheye lenses aim for these same image properties.
Even with azimuthal equidistant projection, when projecting dome masters in a physical dome,
the content will only appear un-distorted to a viewer seated at the exact midpoint of the dome.
At that ideal spot, straight lines will appear perfectly straight and circles will appear perfectly
circular. In the real world, viewers will seat themselves throughout a venues seating, resulting
in varying levels of distortion from their points of view. To these viewers, straight lines will bow
and circular orbits will appear as ellipses. These effects scale with size of the projected content.
As a result, important action is typically confined to small regions of the dome, such as the sweet
spot, where local dome curvature is close enough to a flat screen to minimize distortion.

Orthographic renders
suitable for stitching into a
dome master image.

When creating dome masters in computer graphics production, there are two common
approaches. The simpler of the two approaches is to render an image through a synthetic
180 degree fisheye lens. The images generated are directly usable as dome masters with no
extra steps. Unfortunately, support for 180 degree fisheye rendering is not offered in all CGI
rendering systems, so a second common approach can be used in these cases. In this case, several
orthographic views of a given scene are rendered, rather than a single fisheye image. Each
orthographic render in the set is made from a synthetic camera looking out from a given camera
location along the three axes. To cover the dome, five ortho renders are required: left, front,
right, back, and top. Adding a bottom ortho view is not needed for hemispherical domes. The
illustration above shows five orthographic renders arranged in an unwrapped box configuration.
Note that all orthographic views except the top channel are half-height (0.5 aspect ratio), while
the top ortho view is square (1.0 aspect ratio). While full-height images can also be used as input
for full dome stitchers, half of the pixels in these images will be wasted, as they lie outside the
180 visible dome region. Therefore, it is possible to save render time and disk space with halfheight images for all channels but the top orthographic view. Once all orthographic images
are generated, they can then be processed into a dome master using existing software, such as
DomeXF for Adobe AfterEffects, or Pineappleware QuickStitcher.
Full dome theaters are built with a wide range of dome coverages and tilts. While domes
are never more than 180 degrees, they are often less. Since a dome master contains 180
degrees of view, a 170 degree dome will discard 10 degrees of the view contained in the
dome master. Which 10 degrees will be
ignored depends on whether the dome
master is tilted during the slicing process.
In an effort to coordinate the horizon
present in the dome master images with
the spring line of the physical dome, it is
common to tilt the dome master as dome
slices are produced. As we noted above,
the circumference of the dome image
maps to the spring line of a 180 degree
dome with zero degrees of tilt. Once
the dome is tilted, the spring line will no
longer match the circumference of the
dome master.
2

Orthographic images,
projected in a dome.

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