Garden Gnome Software

Good morning everyone.

I've been using Pano2VRPro for a few weeks now and I'm getting on well with it. I think the skin editor is the hardest thing to learn but it's starting to make sense. Interestingly I've discovered that with the right gear and software, shooting the Pano photos is the easiest part of the whole job!

Anyway, I have two questions which I don't *think* are answered on here, certainly not by a quick search. If someone can assist and advise it would be great.

My first question is whether it's possible to output an HTML tour that only contains some (or one in this case) of the nodes? I can use tags to only show certain nodes in the browser but they still appear on the output. I could start another tour and just load the pano I need, but that seems like a workaround when I suspect there's an elegant solution.

The other question relates to a recommendation for best practice with a big tour. I'm making a tour of a school and I think the exterior alone will end up at around 200 nodes, covering many buildings and other areas around the campus. I wouldn't want someone to have to take a virtual "walk" from one side to the other, so I wonder if anyone has a suggestion about grouping nodes and utilising some kind of floor-plan/map?

Even just a pointer to how others have built a manageable tour over a big area with a lot of nodes might help, just so that I can see how it was achieved.

I've looked at the floor-plan feature in V6 (I only use V6) but what I'm visualising is a big map grouping perhaps a dozen locations, with a visit to each of those locations then showing all of the relevant nodes in that location. Not sure I've explained that well, I could probably knock up a graphic to demonstrate if it would help.

Thanks for reading, sorry for such a long post.

Hi,
To check my understanding you have a multi node project.
You use tags to filter the tour browser to now only show one node.
Now you want to create an output but this output to only contain this one node.

I was sure this was a feature request but I can not find it. Maybe it was decided that just making a project that contains the nodes you actually want would be the better solution. Why would you not just do this and have a project file that contains input images you will not use?
If there is a good use case for this then I will add another feature request.


For best practices it is really a personal choice but for a large project I would first sort all the panoramas into folders, example:
building_a
building_b_ground
building_b_first
building_b_second
outside_front
outside_back

Then save a p2vr file to the main project folder.
You can then open the new saved project file and drag in the folders to the viewer or tour browser. All the panoramas will be tagged with the folder names making it easier to use the filter in the tour browser.
If you end up using floor plans then the tags are already in place to use.

If you have named each pano so it has the title of its location, example: Road Entrance.tif, Main Entrance.tif then you can use a placeholder in the user data title $(n).
This will use the input images file name for the user data title.

I would filer out panos that are not being worked on then connect using the Hotspot viewer mode, again the hotspot title can use the user data title which would now be the panos file name.
Learning the keyboard shortcuts for target view makes this task very fast.

So this would cover tags, user data and hotspot.
You just need to build your skin, the Tour Map/Floor plan feature would be good here but as you have the panos tagged.
You can use Tags with the floor plan or the Thumbnail menu.
You can have buttons that set a value to the cloner which would be a tag, so only the panos with that tag will be displayed.
The same with the Map, just set a value to the map element.
Regards,
Hopki

Hopki wrote: ↑Wed Apr 25, 2018 12:48 pm Hi,
To check my understanding you have a multi node project.
You use tags to filter the tour browser to now only show one node.
Now you want to create an output but this output to only contain this one node.

I was sure this was a feature request but I can not find it. Maybe it was decided that just making a project that contains the nodes you actually want would be the better solution. Why would you not just do this and have a project file that contains input images you will not use?
If there is a good use case for this then I will add another feature request.

Hi Martin/Hopki

Well my (perhaps naive) reply to the answer about not starting a new project with just the nodes I need is due to patching the nadir and zenith.

My school tour project is gradually coming together and although it currently has around 35 nodes, we're just making one or two "mini tours" from them for now. So there's a chapel tour in the project with four nodes, and a sports hall tour with six. Eventually they'll all be part of the one big tour (as mentioned in my original post), but for now I just need to split things up. Partly so that I can invoice for work to date!

I'm patching the nodes, which works brilliantly, no problem there. But... if I start a new project with just the nodes I need I don't have those same patches already in place. I assume I could go and reload the patches but that seems like a bit more work than if there was a way to just choose the nodes I want to use when outputting.

If the patches could be permanently associated with the pano image that would be easier (perhaps they can), but I'd still prefer the option outlined above.

I'll post a follow up to your second reply in another post in a few minutes.

Thanks, Steve

p.s - I've noticed a couple of times that I've had to relink patches as the software seems to think they've moved. I'll report more on this if it happens again.

Hopki wrote: ↑Wed Apr 25, 2018 12:48 pm For best practices it is really a personal choice but for a large project I would first sort all the panoramas into folders, example:
building_a
building_b_ground
building_b_first
building_b_second
outside_front
outside_back

Then save a p2vr file to the main project folder.
You can then open the new saved project file and drag in the folders to the viewer or tour browser. All the panoramas will be tagged with the folder names making it easier to use the filter in the tour browser.
If you end up using floor plans then the tags are already in place to use.

If you have named each pano so it has the title of its location, example: Road Entrance.tif, Main Entrance.tif then you can use a placeholder in the user data title $(n).
This will use the input images file name for the user data title.

I would filer out panos that are not being worked on then connect using the Hotspot viewer mode, again the hotspot title can use the user data title which would now be the panos file name.
Learning the keyboard shortcuts for target view makes this task very fast.

So this would cover tags, user data and hotspot.
You just need to build your skin, the Tour Map/Floor plan feature would be good here but as you have the panos tagged.
You can use Tags with the floor plan or the Thumbnail menu.
You can have buttons that set a value to the cloner which would be a tag, so only the panos with that tag will be displayed.
The same with the Map, just set a value to the map element.
Regards,
Hopki

OK thanks, that's a lot to take in but I'll get there I'll practice with my 35 nodes before taking it to around 200-300 nodes.

Hey,

There is a way to make the patches part of the pano image. In the properties panel -> 'Convert Input' bakes the patches into the pano image. Remember to choose the correct type from the dropdown. If you are using equirectangular panos then you should choose that. There is also a checkbox: 'Apply all patches' which is what you want.

IronWagen wrote: ↑Thu Apr 26, 2018 8:51 am Hey,

There is a way to make the patches part of the pano image. In the properties panel -> 'Convert Input' bakes the patches into the pano image. Remember to choose the correct type from the dropdown. If you are using equirectangular panos then you should choose that. There is also a checkbox: 'Apply all patches' which is what you want.

Ah thanks. I gave that a go and can report it worked perfectly on the images that were an exact 2:1 ratio.

Only a couple of days ago did I realise that quite a lot weren't that ratio because I've been shooting just two rows and then patching top and bottom. They worked fine in PanoVR but now I've found the correct setting in PTGUI they'll all be 2:1

Thanks for the tip.

Hopki wrote: ↑Wed Apr 25, 2018 12:48 pm Hi,
To check my understanding you have a multi node project.
You use tags to filter the tour browser to now only show one node.
Now you want to create an output but this output to only contain this one node.
I was sure this was a feature request but I can not find it. Maybe it was decided that just making a project that contains the nodes you actually want would be the better solution. Why would you not just do this and have a project file that contains input images you will not use?
If there is a good use case for this then I will add another feature request.

Hi Hopki and others

To follow up on the above and my question about making "sub-tours" from a main tour I'd like to explain a little more about what I'm hoping to achieve. My tour is of a school and will eventually consist of what I think will be around 500 nodes. Something like 70-100 exterior ones and then perhaps 400 interior ones taken in the more interesting locations.

One such location would be the sports hall, and my clients have already published an unfinished tour onto their site because they're rather excited about it! I suggested they didn't do this but hey, it's their choice:

https://www.wellington-school.org.uk/up ... index.html

So that's an example of a "sub-tour". It's on a sports page and I/they don't want people visiting that page to take a virtual walk out of the building and to other parts of the school, it should just be a tour of the sports hall. There will be at least a dozen other sub-tours, such as the science block, music department, some boarding houses... Tours in parts of the site that only relate to the page they're on.

I hope I'm making sense so far.

But... There will also be a tour of the entire school, built of course from exactly the same pano images and I don't want to have to rebuild all of the hotspots and titles etc. That tour will have a "floor plan" overlay and people will be able to go everywhere from a few main hotspots. Here's a VERY rough example, which you can see has that sportshall tour as one of the options, along with a visit to the chapel and the middle of the cricket pitch:

http://www.missingman.co.uk/sportshall-tour/index.html

So I want to build my entire tour in one lovely big project, but then be able to choose nodes to export to create those sub-tours. Now it does seem that I could do this by saving lots of copies of my project and then deleting around 480 nodes each to leave just the ones I want, but this feels a bit messy. Better would be the option to only include certain nodes in an output.

Again, I hope that makes sense.

Thanks
Steve