Faking reality for generating panorama maps
Abstract
Panorama maps are widely used by mountain operators to promote their resorts. They are both used to beautify the landscape and depict the relief and tracks so that users easily find their way. Depending on the chosen viewpoint, they can be subject to many different constraints: the full resort should be visible; the ski tracks should always go down in the rendered image; the terrain should be legible everywhere, without strong shadow areas; etc. To fulfill all these goals, a panorama map is designed as a mix between realistic and abstract elements. If well known artists (e.g. Heinrich C. Berann, Heinz Vielkind, James Niehues or Pierre Novat) mastered at creating panoramas by hand, generating such maps digitally is still challenging. In this work, we present the digital tools and manual processes we used to create “Les 7 Laux” panorama map. One major difficulty here is to make sure that all ski tracks clearly appear in the image, as they are located on two different sides of the mountain. To do so, we introduce a dedicated terrain deformation tool allowing to locally warp parts of the relief such that all tracks are visible while still generating a plausible rendering. The shading model automatically selects color patterns (snow/rocks) according to shape properties and locally modifies light directions to maximize contrasts and prevent too dark or too bright areas. Trees are then generated automatically using procedural sprites that can adapt to lighting conditions. Tracks themselves are finally drawn by hand to satisfy the aforementioned constraints.