Although ICE will generate a full 360 x 180 degree image when exporting to a JPEG or TIFF, exporting to HDView inserts black circles at zenith and nadir (straight up and straight down). The full info is there to fill in the circles and yet HDView draws a blank.
Below is a polar projection (using Photoshop) of an ICE spherical mapping. Note the seamless join around the zenith, at the fluorescent fixture and ceiling tile.
You can see the HDView result here. Drag up / down to see the black circles.
Both results came from the same ICE project file, where the fixed image was further processed with Photoshop to get the polar projection.
Thanks for posting the HDView :)
This is a known limitation of HDView. The polar regions in equirectangular maps stretch across many tiles. When we created the fisheye feature in HDView we ran into a last minute bug that memory use got very large (from reading in all these tiles) when zooming into the nadir or zenith regions. We decided to fix this with an ugly band-aid of blacking out these areas. Hopefully we can address this correctly in a future release.
Then the solution is to generate two extra tiles for zenith and nadir, saved with the set. A tiny bit of extra work for ICE, and a lot of effort spared for HDView. And a visually pleasing result.
There is a new version of HDView available that fixes this issue.
Excellent! What do I have to do to use the new version on my existing HDView panoramas?
You shouldn't have to do anything, but install the latest version. If you visit any HDView site it should prompt you to update. For example go to: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/redmond/groups/ivm/HDView/HDGigapixel.htm
Ah yes! Very good!
Clicking the link you provided with my browser (Firefox 3.5) showed no change (still v3) and no prompt for upgrade. Opening the link in IE prompted me for the upgrade. Now I have v3.3 and the problem is fixed (both in IE and in Firefox). Thank you very much.