When we create a 360º panorama there is always the problem of having the tripod legs at the bottom or some distortion in the sky. We can easily clean this by using a couple of SphericalTransform nodes and the Rotopaint in Nuke for cloning. Let’s see the order.

First we need a pano. I did this for the Dancing Swat. It was stitched with PTGui.

As we can see there is the tripod at the bottom. We could paint it out this way but it will be more difficult due to the distortion than facing it from above. In order to do this we must connect the panorama to a SphericalTransform node and change the Input Type from Mirror Ball to Lat Long Map. Then in the Output Rotation parameter “rz” we must rotate the map -90 degrees. From this point of view we can use the RotoPaint. We can view the before and after in the image below.

After the cleaning we have to realign the map as we have it in the beginning. For this we connect another SphericalTransform. Change the Input Type from Mirror Ball to Lat Long Map and move 90 degrees the rotation in the z axis in the Output Rotation parameter “rz” negating the first change. And that’s it, the cleaning is done.

If we’d like to clean the sky we simply have to rotate z the opposite way (90º and -90º in their respectives nodes). Also it’s good to know that this will work too for moving images.