Thank you for the kudos!
I am using Autopano Pro, too. In my opinion one of the best stitchers on the market. In most cases, no fine-tuning is necessary after preview - e. g. straightening verticals. Thats very important if you have to process 10-15 panos at a time...
The skins I used for the flash files are all self-made.
All my panos were shot using a Nikon D200 and a Sigma 12-24 mm lens (In January, I upgraded to a Nikon D700 and the fantastic Nikkor 14-24mm lens - but I haven´t used this combination for panoramic images, yet). I´m using a Manfrotto 303 SPH panoramic head set to 15 images for a 360-degree-shot. I usually set the focal lenght to 15 mm (equals ~ 22 mm on the D700). This grants that the overlap of the pictures is big enough. I prefer to have some more overlap, because sometimes the surfaces of the rooms have little detail or are weak in contrast which is difficult for the software to find anchor points for stitching.
I normally use aperture 8, maybe more if I need more depth of field. After placing the tripod, I usually do a complete 360 degree spin without taking photos, just looking for problems with overlap areas, looking for the best exposure time. This also helps the tripod to come to a more stable position. After the test round, I control the set-up of the panoramic head again and do some fine tuning with a spirit level. This really is the most important thing - be as fastidious as possible during the set-up.
If the set-up is all fine, I start taking the photos using a remote trigger to minimize the movement of the set-up and prevent shake. First, I do a complete horizontal 360 degrees (15 Images in my workflow, either single shots or bracketed shots with different exposures, if HDR is needed). Then, I tilt the camera upwards circa 45 degrees and do a second full circle (the overlap usually is big enough that a zenith shot is obsolete - except for very high rooms...)
Last, but not least, the third set of photos is taken with the camera tilted down 45 degrees. (Talking about the nadir later)
So you see - to tele lens is needed, unless you want a really huge panorama. With my workflow, the resulting panoramas are some 18.000 x 9000 pixel big, big enough to have a nice level of detail, but small enough to be stitchable even with 32 bit software. (I use 64 bit Windows 7 with 64 bit Autopano Pro and 64 bit Pano2VR but 32 bit PhotoShop CS3).
In most cases, I don´t take an extra nadir shot. Indoors, it´s to dark to take a free-hand picture and I do not want to take a second tripod with me for that nadir-shot only. So what you get after stitching the pano is a more-or-less circular remain of the panoramic head and the legs of the tripod in the nadir area of the pano. You can easyly extract the bottom view of the pano with Pano2VR and retouch the nadir in Photoshop. That can be quite tricky depending on the complexity of the floor, but in 90% of my panos, that works fine.
As you can see - there is no "magic" in my workflow - just a lot of try-and-error and a lot of practice
![Wink ;-)](./images/smilies/icon_wink.gif)
Hope it helped. If you have additional questions, please ask. I hope that I can upload the rest of the still photos soon, unfortunately I´m a bit short in time this week.
Best regards,
-Frank