Kite Aerial Photography
3D image rendering

As well as the Virtual Reality Shots allowing you to look in all directions, aerial shots lend themselves to making 3D images. This technology is used extensively to give you fly-through views of places that are still to be built or to build up a world in a computer game, but the same technology can be used with KAP, illustrated here with a picture of Greenacres Cottage, Tiree, taken in July 2003.

This video fly-past was created from 3 KAP images and some software I was introduced to by Simon Harbord, Canoma by Metacreations. Unfortunately the company and software no longer exist, but if you can find a copy it still produces great results!

Click the image to see it in a larger window.

Lets see how this video clip was made...

This is the basic image, a house with an interesting roof. KAP allows up to see the house from a great angle, two walls and the roof can be clearly seen.

This technique tends to attract "fly past" shots (as above) so having original material from the air ensures that roofs and other areas of interest are well recorded on the original images so they are of high quality when the finished item is viewed.
Canoma allows you to build a wire-frame representation of the house as shown here. The main box area of the house is shown in red, with other boxes and triangles representing roofs, porches and chimneys.

The tool is fairly intuitive and the structures can be built up quite quickly. However it is not possible to see round corners, so the rear (including the rear roof), and far wall of the house are still a mystery. 

A second image from a different perspective is added to fill in details of the gable walls that cannot be seen in the original image. The program allows this image to be added and the wire-frame is simple "stretched" to fit this second image.

In this case a third KAP image looking straight down from above fills in details of the rear of the roof, and details of the chimneys.

Once this work is completed the program "renders" the pictures onto the sides of the wire-framed structure. 

The image on the left has this partially done, i.e. the front of the main house, the ground, and the rear roof are completed, this illustrates how the various "faces" are "painted on". 

Various "tricks" exist for colouring and texturing faces where the program has no data. In this case I had no image of the rear of the building so I replaced it with a "gray" wall, and by ensuring it is not very visible in the video the illusion is maintained.

Finally the image can either be viewed in the tool where you have control over the viewing position, or it can be exported in formats like VRML for viewing in a 3D viewer later. For this presentation a number of key-frames were chosen and the program allows you to "fly" through the image from frame to frame. This was recorded as a video and can be seen at the top of the page.