My Autopano Pro forum

Please do not be put off by beebola's harsh language.  In this forum we respect and support each other.  Each of us has different skills and interests.  Please tell us more about the pano head you built.  It might be as good as anything you are willing to purchase.  I myself use the Manfrotto 303SPH, which is overkill for my small camera.

As beebola has said, a full sphere panorama (360 degrees by 360 degrees) is the most difficult kind to make.  You will need a good pano head, a good camera, a fisheye lens, a powerful computer, AutoPano Pro, and lots of patience.  I recommend you climb the AutoPano Pro learning curve by starting with an easier project: a simple circular panorama. 

On an overcast day, go out into the middle of an open field with an interesting horizon.  Take a single row of pictures, rotating the camera for each picture so that about 20 percent of each picture overlaps with the one before and the one after.  Ask AutoPano Pro to assemble your images into a panorama.  Spend some time with AutoPano Pro's tone controls so you get a feel for how they work.  Post the result in our gallery for us all to admire.

Once you have done the easy panorama, try some harder ones: do the above on a sunny day, and deal with the change in illumination (I am still at this stage).  Add rows higher and lower than horizontal, and have AutoPano Pro stitch them along with the horizontal row.  Similarly, add a zenith and a nadir shot.  To avoid imaging the tripod, remove it for the nadir shot and hand-hold the camera.  Another hard case is an indoor panorama, since some objects will be much closer to the camera than others, requiring a well-adjusted pano head.

The virtual reality viewers work by taking a spherical panorama, dividing it into manageable parts, then assembling the appropriate parts as needed depending on which way the viewer is looking.

Ok sorry, it was too late… i messed-up and I deleted…
I Apologies for what John Sauter called 'Please do not be put off by beebola's harsh language" This was quite unfair from me!

If pokering99 needs a real estate viewer, the easiest I know and have tested successfully is Tourweaver 4.00
A bit expensive but no need to know any code… HERE
Tutorial in video is quite poor, you need to download help in pdf…
The free trial version is only putting an annoying message while seeing the rendered job.

EDIT: I have posted some screenshots on  panophoto.org

Is my answer Ok or Am I seriously off track again

Last edited by beeloba (2008-11-13 02:25:23)

pokering99 wrote:

I am pretty new to this pano thing.  I have taken photos and got a good pano but I would like to be able to view it in a virtual reality type viewer, such as the real estate demo on the autopano site - http://www.autopano.net/applications/real-estate.html

Can anyone help me get the proper viewer for this or a tutorial to point me towards?  It also appears on the images below they nearly 180 degree verticals, how do you do that without getting the tripod?

Thanks

IMO the simplest tool for converting stitched panos to VR viewing 'formats' is Pano2VR:
http://gardengnomesoftware.com/pano2vr.php

This will enable you to produce VR panos which can be displayed with Flash or Quicktime. Pano2VR will even create an HTML page for you.

Flash is becoming increasingly popular because most people will have the Flash player installed on their systems already.

If you are skilled at writing XML files then you may wish to look at KRpano and Flash Panorama Player:
http://krpano.com/
http://flashpanoramas.com/player/

If you wish to create full spherical (360x180 FOV) panos then you will need a pano head, and preferably a fish eye. or very wide angle. lens to reduce the number of shots required to provide 360x180 coverage.

The Nodal Ninja panoheads are very popular, well made and competitively priced:
http://www.nodalninja.com

The least expensive 'proper' pano head is the Panosaurus - but it lacks click stops and cannot handle heavier cameras:
http://gregwired.com/pano/Pano.htm?gcli … 1QodkTfbXg

Last edited by mediavets (2008-11-13 13:52:51)

pokering99 wrote:

Great info, Thanks for the help!

Happy to help - I was beginner not so long ago and recall how puzzling I found at lot of the technicalities initially.

Here's a bit more info that you may find helpful that I have copied from another of my posts:

The purpose of using a proper pano head is to enable rotation of the camera/lens around the lens NPP (No Parallax Point) which as it suggests avoids parallax issues which cause problems when stitching.

Parallax is a bigger issue with shorter focal length lenses with scenes closer to the camera - shoting indoor scenes with a fisheye lens would be the extreme case.

If you have nothing in a scene closer than about 100m then parallax is not an issue.

A pano head also helps ensure consistently adequate overlaps between images when shooting with longer focal length lenses where you need multiple rows to cover a scene.

A good pano head just makes it all much easier, shooting and stitching.

If you are only going to shoot single row panos you can probably fabricate an adequate pano bracket yourself. DIY multirow brackets are harder to make.

Commercially made pano brackets are mostly designed to accommodate a wide variety of camera bodies and lenses. A DIY pano head can be camera and lens specfic which can simplify design and construction:
http://www.peterloud.co.uk/nodalsamurai … murai.html
http://michel.thoby.free.fr/Nadir/Slim/ … tator.html
And this is amusing:
http://www.vrmag.org/issue30/MICHEL_THO … OHEAD.html

You can shoot panos with any lens. The longer the focal length the smaller the FOV so you need more images to cover a scene., but the higher the resolution of the stitched pano.

Always use manual focus and manual exposure settings - typically the same settings for every shot in a pano. Never use a flash.

Last edited by mediavets (2008-11-13 17:59:07)

pokering99 wrote:

I've downloaded and started playing with AutoPano Pro, and just today PTgui, so far I'm quite impressed.  With PTgui I have been able to produce the .mov and get pretty good results.  Still thinking of using Pano2VR but haven't started playing with it yet.   I am very interested in full 360 with nadir.  Currently I'm going through all the tutorials on the PTGui site and their Links page as well.

I am very technically oriented and all of this is quite fun, thanks again for the help!

Take a look at the new patch tool in pano2VR this can help with editing the nadir in a very simple way:
http://gardengnomesoftware.com/tutorial.php?movid=09

John_Sauter wrote:

As beebola has said, a full sphere panorama (360 degrees by 360 degrees) is the most difficult kind to make.  You will need a good pano head, a good camera, a fisheye lens, a powerful computer, AutoPano Pro, and lots of patience.  I recommend you climb the AutoPano Pro learning curve by starting with an easier project: a simple circular panorama.

No need for a fisheye lens, any lens will do, but the longer the lens, the narrower angle of view, and the more images you have to stitch.

E.g. 8mm fisheye on FF camera - vertex, nadir, 4 around (yes, you can tilt the camera and eliminate the vertex)
12mm rectilinear on FF camera - vertex, nadir, three rows of 8 shots (for about 50% overlap.)