Panorama Feedback Please

[tuna57]

O.K. here's the deal... I've just started learning how to shoot and stitch my own panos to use in renders. Posting a pic of one. I would appreciate feedback as this is definitely new territory for me. The pano is a 360 equirectangular image. The model is just a quickie building, lots of windows for the view and threw in Susan for sense of scale. Some questions are..... How is the scale of the pano in relation to the model looking, I'm getting a little cross eyed working on these things and not trusting my eye right now. Also is there a simple way to get shadows in the model to correspond with the pano's shadows. I set the shadows in SU to the approximate date and time I shot the pano but it still required a good deal of rotating the pano in TW sun setting window. I even ended up moving the building some in relation to the origin in SU. Any comments or tips you might have would be appreciated as I solider on into new territory. Final thing the pano is not hdri and there are some parallax issues as I shot the images handheld.

[Chris]

Definitely the best example of this I've seen so far. It's simple, yes, but the perspective and shadows are very well matched.

The key with environments is that the camera that photographed them should be in the exact same place (especially vertical height!) where the rendered camera will be placed. This is the most critical detail.

As for why the shadows didn't automatically match up, the only thing I can think is, did you set your scene's Latitude and Longitude to the same location where you photographed the scene? The position of the sun is highly dependent on lat-lon and while it probably won't be way off if they are wrong, it will be off. I think the default location for a SketchUp scene is Boulder, Colorado, USA (where At-last started, right?). Also, you might need to adjust by an hour one way or another depending on Daylight Savings (if applicable).

I wouldn't be surprised if you get hit up for some contract work, as finding good panos that fit your scene can be challenging.

[Chris]

Oh, and you also might want to make sure 'Corrected Shadows' is checked in the Environment editor. This will place the sun further from the scene and will reduce parallax errors especially with a small model (it will make the shadows fall more correctly).

[jo-ke]

Looks pretty good to me

[tuna57]

Chris, Thanks for the kind words and bigger thanks for your input. Totally clueless about the whole longitude latitude thing. I suspect that might be why I had to fiddle around with rotating the pano to get the shadows looking close. I guess I better do a little reading on that subject . Happy circumstance was I think when I moved the model around a little I got the render camera position fairly close to the rotation point of the pano when I took the pics. Pure luck on my part. I do think I had corrected shadows ticked when I ran the render. I also set the view height in the render to approximately the same height as the photos were shot.

jo-ke, If it looks good to you by gosh that's all I need . If I keep messing about with this stuff I might live long enough to turn some renders out close to the quality of yours. Then again I'm kind of old, not sure I'll make it. But I'll sure keep trying. Thanks.

[Glenn-CO]

Good job, I used the ruler in Windows ink to check the VP, pretty darn close.
The Toyota truck looks squeezed a little, is that the parallax effect you mentioned?
Would a tripod help, that way the VP would all be the same height?
overall scale looks good too.
Glenn

vp.png (219.54 KiB) Viewed 6817 times

[tuna57]

Glenn, Good god man, never expected somebody would stick a ruler on the darn thing . I suspect the the v.p. 's being slightly off is from not having the SU viewpoint dead over the center of the pano. I was wondering about the white truck not looking quite spot on also. Need to check the pano to see if the distortion is in the pano image or from things not quite lined up in SU. Shot the pics "handheld" because my pano head for the tripod hadn't arrived yet. You introduce the parallax if your not spot on the "no parallax point" of the camera lens when your rotating around. The v.p. of the images were pretty close, I was using my reflection in the cameras back display to gauge the height of the shots. The stitching software can handle minor height variances between shots pretty well, what it can't fix so well is the parallax if your rotation point varies to much. Thanks for the positive input.