Setup and Render a Panoramic or Panorama View

[crdave]

I need to create a rendered panoramic view of the interior of a museum. In reality what I'm looking to do is render the image and prepare it in such a way that I can embed it into a web flash app so even though the image only appears at say 510x700 at a time there is 510x2000 of an image to scroll through.

What I am doing right now is setting a fixed camera point and rendering several scenes where the camera pans from one end of the room to the other each scene rendered at 510x1072, then afterwords using photoshop to photomerge them into a panoramic view. However, I'm having two serious issues with this:

1- For some reason, most of the time I try the photomerge photoshop returns an error saying "some images could not be automatically aligned". I assume this error occurs because the manual panning I did in the sketchup while setting up the scenes is having too much variation.
2- This is a time consuming proccess.

Is there a better way to setup, render and prepare a panoramic view? something like 510x2000 px?

attahced are the examples of the result from the procedure I'm using right now.

[Chris]

What field of view do you need for your panorama? If you are looking for a full 360, you could render with the camera set to Cylindrical.

[Fletch]

Funny you should mention it...
Subject: Spherical Image - A Day at the Natural History Museum

[crdave]

Thanks Chris and Fletch, I've been playing around with both options, the spherical and cylindrical projections. I'm not sure if its because the room itself has a bit unusual geometry (octagons) but I feel like the images produced are bit wired. I set the camera to 2 point perspective to level out the eyes and the camera is really only a view feet away from that center column which looks like its extremely far away in this image. I think the projection type is trying to render a 360-degree panorama but I think what I'm really looking for is a 180-degree panorama or a 4-1 image ration, is there a way to do that or set the cut off point for the camera?

[crdave]

One other question, I noticed in the natural history museum rendering (which is awesome by the way!!) there is some sort of flash application that allows the user through the web browser to control to pan the camera around the room. What sort of application is that or where can I find more info on that? Thanks!

[Chris]

Fletch can answer your flash question, as he knows that best. As far as your 180 degree panorama, have you tried rendering cylindrical at twice your desired final width, then trimming a quarter of each side? I don't know if that will get you the look you want, but in theory that should give you 180 degrees.

[Fletch]

To display the spherical of the museum in a forum or on a website you must register for a website which displays these spherical images in a web browser. one example was pan0.net


remember - use the SU tool with the guy with the red x at his feet to place your camera horizontal. Don't click and drag when you place your camera with that guy. You simply click on the floor where you want to place your camera. Then use the walk-around two feet icon to position the camera exactly where you want while maintaining the Z axis perpendicular.

2 point perspective only works with Twilight without panning around after you choose it.

Read these steps carefully

1. Find a view that would be interesting as a spherical image using the little guy with a red X at his feet that is the Position Camera tool in SketchUp, and then the little "Walk" tool footprints to adjust the camera.
2. This method of camera placement guarantees that the eye will be level with the ground. This step is critical for making a good spherical image for Architecture!
3. Add new scene when camera is positioned properly.
4. Open Twilight Render Dialog
5. Set image resolution to 2500x1250 (any 2:1 proportion will work)
6. Click Camera tab in Render Dialog
7. Set Camera type to Spherical
8. Render
9. Added watermark in Photoshop. No other post pro done to image.

Then upload your spherical image to the website
get the code for the image link
post it to the forum like this:

Code: Select all

[url=http://pan0.net/w/up-1516][img]http://pan0.net/data/users/panos/thumbnails/759/1516.jpg[/img][/url]  Second test here: [url=http://pan0.net/w/up-1523][img]http://pan0.net/data/users/panos/thumbnails/759/1523.jpg[/img][/url]

Result is this:

Second test here:

or get the html embed code for your image, and put it on your webpage.

There is no way to limit the spherical image to 180 degrees from within Twilight, but what you could do is create a black box around your camera with one open side so that the camera would render the spherical image normally, but be basically pure black wherever you do not want to see. Then you can cut that part off in photoshop as Chris mentioned.

There are literally thousands of tutorials, websites, and softwares and/or plugins for wordpress or joomla websites, all of which can guide you how to embed a partial-panoramic image into your website. It depends on many things. Some plugins or other software use flash, some use pure html 5 or java, etc.

There's a plugin for SketchUp that will automatically set up the 6 cameras if you want to use it - I think you can search for 'cubic pano out sketchup plugin' or something like this. I never used it because I like the convenience of Twilight's spherical camera. One cam, and one click.

Remember that large white surfaces can take a long time to clear up. Using a denoise software will handle those pure white surface quite well and save you lots of render time. Topaz Denoise 5 and Neat Image and Noise Ninja are some products to think about.