I tried to put together a composite of my basement stairs. In this case ICE will only allow spherical or cylindrical mapping and the best it'll do is this:
What I really want is rectilinear. PanoTools gives me the following image:
Personal opinions of aesthetics aside, as far as I'm concerned it's a severe limitation that although ICE can calculate the rectilinear version (it will show a preview), it won't generate the final result at all.
It's a pity, because I find ICE very powerful, unbelievably fast and simplicity itself to use. But if it won't generate the desired final image then it doesn't matter how elegant the program is. It's little more than a toy.FWIW, I'm running Vista 64 on Intel E8400 with 8GB RAM.
Component images: image 1, image 2, image 3, image 4, image 5, image 6, image 7, image 8.
ICE project file here.
This issue has been discussed a few times on the forum
http://community.research.microsoft.com/forums/p/2577/4076.aspx#4076
http://community.research.microsoft.com/forums/p/2229/3372.aspx#3372
Unfortunately ICE has a built in rule that images > than 140 degree field of view can't be saved as perspective. What you are hitting is this internal threshold so ICE reverts to equirectangular. For your set of images I can't think of an easy way to work around this limitation other than to re-shoot them to not include those portions that are cropped out in the PanoTools example.
While I very much appreciate the feedback of experienced pano photographers like yourself, I'm not sure that ICE is for you. If you are an experienced PanoTools user then I think it likely that you will continue to be frustrated by the lack of advanced controls in ICE. We intended this program as a quick and dirty stitching program for simple stitching tasks. It certainly isn't meant to compete with more advanced tools like PTGUI or AutoPano. That said I do think that it compares favorably to tools like Photoshop's photomerge and other automatic solutions.
I understand, and I'll adjust my expectations and workflow accordingly.
There are two things that ICE does far, far better than any other stitching program out there: 1) it has a wonderfully intuitive and responsive way of interactively setting the horizon to ensure straight horizontals and verticals, and 2) it is insanely fast at blending very large images, along with a surprisingly tiny memory footprint. Blends that bog down with 2GB of RAM on other packages sail through with 200MB on ICE.
Those two things are so game-changing that I'd love to switch to ICE exclusively and never look back. The experience pushed my expectations way up, which colored my perception of the software's shortcomings.