RealViz, a maker of image-based content creation software, has now brought Stitcher 3.0 to the Mac platform. Targeted to photographers, Webmasters, architects, 3D artists and post-production professionals, Stitcher is a standalone application for creating panoramic images up to 360 x 360 degrees.
Stitcher automatically combines horizontally and vertically overlapping photographs to create a fully immersive image that spans a 180-degree vertical and 360 degree horizontal field of view in seconds. Panoramas are color blended, de-blurred and perfectly warped so they can be used without any additional editing, according to Dominique Pouliquen, president and CEO of RealViz.
Stitcher can be used to create high-resolution panoramas for print, architectural visualization, feature film and TV effects, and cylindrical and spherical panoramas for the Web. As the first RealViz product for the Mac, Stitcher currently supports Mac OS 9 and is in beta for Mac OS X, according to Guillaume Duboc, RealViz vice president of marketing professional products. Customers who purchase the current version of Stitcher will be eligible for a free upgrade to the Mac OS X version when it becomes available in the third quarter.
“With export support to QuickTime 5 and Macromedia Director 8.5 Shockwave Studio, we also anticipate that Stitcher will be widely adopted by Web designers for building immersive panoramas for the Internet,” Duboc said.
Stitcher is the first of many RealViz products that will be making their way to the Mac platform. ImageModeler will be the next RealViz application to be available on the Mac platform. The app lets graphics professionals tap directly into the richness of the real world instead of modeling complicated geometry, materials and lighting from scratch, according to the folks at RealViz. Company officials said the software is the first high-end “image-based modeler” to produce virtual 3D models from photo, video and cinematic images.
“The Macintosh has long been the platform of choice for a wide variety of designers, and has a large installed user-base in the web-design community,” said Duboc. “Since our products were introduced, there has been a great demand by artists in the Macintosh community to port our applications, and we are now able to respond to these users’ requests. Our first two products to be ported, Stitcher and ImageModeler, in particular provide the simplest solutions available for designers to build immersive panoramas and photo-real 3D models.”
Stitcher has a manufacturers suggested retail price of US$800. However, if you buy it before the end of August, you can get it for the special “launch price” of $495.