Whimsy is an important part of life – making stuff for the sake of… nothing more than it looks appealing, or something equally non-serious. I’ve recently been struck with making ‘little planet’ images using the ANAFI thermal lately – it’s a wonderful application of the 180 degree gimbal the aircraft has on offer.
Being able to capture a full 360 degree bubble lets you make tiny planet images like this one – using a built-in stitcher in the Freeflight 6 app.
…this one shows a section of the Mitta Mitta river near home. It’s also the first thing on offer as a poster in the upcoming Spatialised web store (print quality assurance underway right now!)
Here’s another, about 50 metres upstream from the first…
…and one more from our temporary (beautiful!!) home:
….and here is one from Benambra, the local ‘big town’ where I’ve been working for the past seven months:
This technique isn’t that new – you can roll you own using the open source panorama stitcher Hugin using a well worn recipe. It is, however, quite fun that Parrot make it built in to the ANAFI toolkit.
Is the 180 gimbal for real work?
..well, yes! More to come on this, to start with though, here’s a model from a 17m tall / almost as wide eucalypt which would be really hard without it. Using the upward looking capability its possible to capture a lot of the internal structure not visible from above. Updates to come on this initial render also!
In the meantime, I’ll be making loads more little planets – with ANAFI’s automation and also with manual shooting / Hugin when I really need to make things pop!
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