Patch sizes too large - alternative method?

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JBrown
Posts: 3
Joined: Tue Jan 12, 2021 5:18 pm

Hi,

Been using Pano2VR for a few months and loving it so far. Its bringing back fond memories of when I used to code in Flash back in 2003...

So I am trying to set up a tour where you are in a kitchen and then you can click on the work surface and its colour changes. You can then click on the cupboards under the surface and their colour changes. Same for wall mounted cupboards and so on. Ideally you could cycle through 3 or 4 colours per element.

I started off testing patches which worked perfectly for small areas of a 360 and switching between just the base 360 and one patch, but in the kitchen I am testing the camera is up close to the surface/cupboards etc so when I attempted to create a patch, not only was it extremely tricky to make it large enough to cover the area I needed, the PNG that was saved out was over 15mb which clearly isn't going to work.

Is there an alternative to patches I could use to achieve my goal? I was thinking that I could have different PNGs for the surface, cupboards etc which are loaded in when clicking on parts of the base image, but they would need to load in the exact position to overlay correctly.

I have searched the forums and the web for some help but couldn't find anything like this. I have it in my head that it's a relatively simple to put together but some guidance would be great and much appreciated, especially on the part of cycling through a few overlays.

Thanks in advance,

James
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Tony
Posts: 1341
Joined: Mon Feb 15, 2010 6:54 am
Location: Adelaide, South Australia
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Hi James,

A couple of questions.

1. Are you using environments rendered in a 3D program?
2. If not and you are shooting the environments how would you be modifying the cupboards for instance to show the different colors?
3. Is there a requirement to say, pick a color for the under cupboards and set that color, then pick a color for the benchtop and set that one as well, and then pick a color for the cupboards and set that as well. So your final selection ended up with a combination of 3 new colors?
4. You mention 3 elements that you would recolor, is that the extent of it or are there more recolored elements in the scene?

Just trying to work out the number of combinations and item permutations :-)

cheers,

Tony
Tony Redhead | Panoramic Photographer | mobile: +61438501002 | website: https://tonyredhead.com - https://redsquare.com | Pano2VR Tutorials: https://tonyredhead.com/pano2vr | instagram: https://www.instagram.com/tonyredhead/
JBrown
Posts: 3
Joined: Tue Jan 12, 2021 5:18 pm

Hi Tony,

Thanks for the reply.

To answer your questions:

1 yes all 3D so can easily change and adapt colours etc in photoshop and save out isolated elements (pigs for example) if needed

3 yes, the user should be able to cycle through colours on individual elements to create combinations as you describe.

4 at the moment this is r&d to present to a client, so no more than 3 at the moment, but it could increase. In my head I picture developing how to cycle the 3 colours of one element (say the surface) and then that method could be replicated over and over for further elements.

Hope that is of some help and useful.

Thanks,

James
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Tony
Posts: 1341
Joined: Mon Feb 15, 2010 6:54 am
Location: Adelaide, South Australia
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Hi James,
1 yes all 3D so can easily change and adapt colours etc in photoshop and save out isolated elements (pigs for example) if needed
If you are generating 3D environments then I wouldn't even consider creating isolated elements. Instead, I would create individual equirectangular images based on the color combinations you need. Creating the isolated elements, adding them into the project, creating skin elements to mange them all it's going to add a lot to your workflow and make your project slower to load.
3 yes, the user should be able to cycle through colours on individual elements to create combinations as you describe.
Okay so multiple combinations of objects and colors
4 at the moment this is r&d to present to a client, so no more than 3 at the moment, but it could increase. In my head I picture developing how to cycle the 3 colours of one element (say the surface) and then that method could be replicated over and over for further elements.
Understood, so I've put together a little sample that may give you some ideas.

AWS_CLI_92.png
AWS_CLI_92.png (574.16 KiB) Viewed 1617 times

https://p2vr.s3-ap-southeast-2.amazonaw ... index.html

So what we have here is a grid of 3 colors x 2 objects. The Bed base comes in gray, blue, and yellow and the Bedding comes in gray, red, and green.

This gives us a total number of combinations = 9. So I have rendered out 9 individual equirectangular images as follows;
  • gray-gray
  • blue-gray
  • yellow-gray
  • gray-red
  • gray-green
  • blue-red
  • blue-green
  • yellow-red
  • yellow-green
I have two text variables: Bed and Bedding with an initial value of gray (both)

I have 6 buttons 3 for Bed base and 3 for Bedding. Clicking on a button sets the matching variable value ie click on Bed Base blue and the variable bed = blue, click on the Bedding red and variable bedding = red. This gives us a combination of blue and red.

I Trigger Click a container that has Actions to open each of the panoramas; mouse click | open next panorama | blue_red | current view. Each action has a modifier eg Execute Action if: bed = blue and bedding = red

The fact that I use 'current view' means no matter how the panorama has moved the transition is always seamless.

cheers,

Tony
Tony Redhead | Panoramic Photographer | mobile: +61438501002 | website: https://tonyredhead.com - https://redsquare.com | Pano2VR Tutorials: https://tonyredhead.com/pano2vr | instagram: https://www.instagram.com/tonyredhead/
JBrown
Posts: 3
Joined: Tue Jan 12, 2021 5:18 pm

Hi Tony,

This is great and thanks for putting it together for me and spending the time on it.

This is definitely a workflow/method I could utilise.

The only downside I can see, which is specific to the way we work, is that our 360s are used in various ways and are rendered very large and in stereo. So the render times would be very high/expensive. Hence why I am taking the approach of individual elements to keep these overheads down. Some elements wouldn't even need to be rendered as we can tone them in Photoshop and then save out a PNG, streamlining the process even further.

Also I am a perfectionist so would love just the element to change and the user not see a whole 360 be loaded in.

Do you thinks it is possible to load in a PNG that sits exactly in the correct position? Would that PNG need to be the same ratio as the 360? If so that's a lot of empty space to load in right? Interested to know your thoughts on this approach and if its feasible? Or if you have any other thoughts?

Thanks again for looking at this. Much appreciated.

James
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Tony
Posts: 1341
Joined: Mon Feb 15, 2010 6:54 am
Location: Adelaide, South Australia
Contact:

The only downside I can see, which is specific to the way we work, is that our 360s are used in various ways and are rendered very large and in stereo. So the render times would be very high/expensive. Hence why I am taking the approach of individual elements to keep these overheads down. Some elements wouldn't even need to be rendered as we can tone them in Photoshop and then save out a PNG, streamlining the process even further.
In that case, you could use a base render, create layers of all the colorization and then output them as individual panoramas while turning off the layers that aren't specific to that panorama.
Also I am a perfectionist so would love just the element to change and the user not see a whole 360 be loaded in.
Using a transition between the nodes tends to hide the loading and the speed can be set to whatever you want. There's a slight variation in the rendering out of Sketchup.
Do you thinks it is possible to load in a PNG that sits exactly in the correct position? Would that PNG need to be the same ratio as the 360? If so that's a lot of empty space to load in right? Interested to know your thoughts on this approach and if its feasible? Or if you have any other thoughts?
You have to load the png as a patch, but that takes you right back to the topic of your post "Patch sizes too large - alternative method". The individually modified panorama is an alternative method :)

cheers,

Tony
Tony Redhead | Panoramic Photographer | mobile: +61438501002 | website: https://tonyredhead.com - https://redsquare.com | Pano2VR Tutorials: https://tonyredhead.com/pano2vr | instagram: https://www.instagram.com/tonyredhead/
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