hi,
i want to create cubemap/skybox textures (6 bitmaps) based on real pictures taken with a digital camera on a tripod. because manual stitching is quite exhausting i'm looking for a software that can do it automaticly or semi automaticly for example by defining common areas/points on pictures.

the software i have, provided by camera producer (Camedia Master) apart from bizzare interface can stitch pictures together only to horizontal panorama.

any clues?

I'm not positive, but Paul Debevec's HDR shop may have the ability to stich cube maps. It's a tool ordinarily used for working with high dynamic-range images, but also includes features for working with environment maps.

http://www.hdrshop.com/

paul debevec's hdr shop does have abiilty to sew cube maps together, but defining point positions manualy without ANY preview is even worse than glueing them in photoshop. i give up.

i've been thinking about algorithm allowing to generate cube max semi automaticly. first step is to define front, up, and right vector. it's done by defining 3 points on bitmap presenting 'front' of the tripod space. second step is to define common points on bitmaps, each bitmap will have 4 neighbours, and for each of them we need 2 points. then using those points we translate pixels from picture/bitmap space to barycentryc coordinates. because we have texel for each altitude and longitude creating 6 textures now shoud be easy. what do you think?

common points selection process could be replaced with some other method.

hope i made myself clear.

anybody?

Ken Silverman made a environment cube viewer, which is able to find by itself the good picture/cube-face pairs :
http://advsys.net/ken/kube/kube.htm

It seems to me to be a step forward to your goal... Maybe, if you ask him, maybe he will explains his works, and help you.

If you're looking for something that takes a set of images and automatically stitches them together into a panorama, try AutoStitch - http://www.cs.ubc.ca/~mbrown/autostitch/autostitch.html which does the whole thing automatically. You can then turn it into a cubemap or whatever you want with HDRShop.

Use DirectX texture tool to create *.DDS texture format, it's very handy tool.