[ptx] hugin 0.4pre available

[Pablo d'Angelo]

Hi all,

Some improvements have been made to hugin, the opensource GUI for Panorama
Tools, since the 0.3beta release.

- Improved UI consistency
- Panorama Druid
- speed up Preview Panel
- better Optimizer Interface
- Improved Control Point editor, with auto estimate
- support for reading PTAssember and PTGui project files.
  (not tested well, it worked with a few example files I had
   laying around)
- finetune all control points (useful when importing projects that
  do not contain fine tuned control points.)
- more keyboard shortcuts in the control point picker
- fixed some crashes

Two new programs are also part of the hugin suite:

- nona   An alternative to PTSticher
  
  Our opensource sticher, faster than PTSticher, but doesn't support
  color correction or featherd seams yet.

  The main feature is its TIFF_mask output: It creates a multilayer
  tiff file, where each layer is only as big as it needs to be.
  This saves a HUGE amount of memory when retouching panoramas.
  
  I use gimp for editing these multilayerd files. Gimp 1.2 and 1.3 need
  an updated tiff plugin, which is available at
  http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?group_id=77506&atid=550443

  I don't know if other programs support multi layer tiff files, but it
  would be interesting to hear if they do.

  nona is a command line program, its usage is:
  nona projectfile.pto output_filename_without_extension

- autopano   Automatically creates project files for single row panos.

  Given a number of images, it creates a hugin project or
  PTOptimizer script, with control points.
  Currently, only single row panorams with rectilinear input images are
  supported. There should be some overlap, 30% or more works best.

  This is alpha software, and was hacked together in two days, but it works
  quite well.

  Usage:

  autopano projectfile.pto image1.jpg image2.jpg image3.jpg

  This will create projectfile.pto, usually with something like 50 control
  points per image pair.
  Sometimes it helps to uses the "finetune all points" function in hugin, to
  align some points better.

  Run autopano without arguments to see more options. 

All this can be downloaded from http://hugin.sf.net, for linux and windows.

We like to support MacOS as well, but we're having problems with compiling
pano12 for MacOS. Maybe a developer on MacOS can help out here, see
http://www.email-lists.org/pipermail/ptx/2004-January/001132.html for more
info.

ciao
  Pablo
--
http://wurm.wohnheim.uni-ulm.de/~redman/
Please use PGP