--- In
[hidden email], Paul Fretheim <paul@...> wrote:
>
> When I started in this business back in the mid-90s you didn't have to
> choose between cylindricals and sphericals because cylindricals were all
> that were available via QTVRAS the tool I was using at the time.
> Several years ago sphericals became popular, and they certainly have
> their place, like inside buildings, but I always felt like those pixels
> in the sky and the dirt at your feet were wasted, that my customers were
> better served with a panorama of a view from the top of a mountain with
> a strip cylindrical shot with a 50 mm lens than they were with spherical
> image shot with a 15 mm, or even worse, with the advent of the DX
> format, a 10 mm lens. But sometimes sphericals are really good, even
> for scenery, like for example, at the edge of the abyss at Toroweap at
> the Grand Canyon.
>
> Well, on my current project, a CD offering VR Illustrated Topo Maps of
> the Sierra Nevada, I have been stuck for a couple of weeks on a panorama
> shot at the top of New Army Pass, a few miles south of the Mt. Whitney
> uplift. The views from there are incredibly expansive, and I had shot a
> 3 row with a 50 mm lens and my D200 at its highest NEF resolution. When
> I input the finished cylinder to Pano2VR, it crashed repeatedly. Then,
> this afternoon I tried cropping the stitched image down to more of a
> cylindrical orientation, getting rid of a lot of clear blue sky and some
> nondescript rocks at my feet (no plants grow at the pass, it's too
> elevated) and now Pano2VR is able to produce a pretty good panorama.
>
> The Black Kaweahs, a strange and very remote range, rises about 30 miles
> distant from New Army Pass, and that's what I used as a marker to decide
> when the image could not be reduced any further without losing important
> detail. So I just sized the image down with Photoshop's Image command
> until the Black Kaweah started to diminish more than I wanted and then
> started cropping out sky and rock until it worked. Now Pano2VR is able
> to produce a pretty good panorama from a source tiff 26880 x 2920.
>
> But there is a noticeable degradation of the image. What is Pano2VR
> doing to the image between the tif and the .swf? Could I be making
> manual steps in creating the pieces of the spherical, or whatever it
> does, to maintain image detail better than the automated functions of
> Pano2VR?
>
Poul
I already answered this once before.
If you are talking about making swf again I do not understand what you are doing.
There is absolutelly no way you can make a full resolution panorama in flash from this size in Pano2VR
Pano2VR sets a max cubeface size of 2880x2880 for flash panoramas.
This is a panorama from a cylinder or a spherical which is 11520 pixels wide.
Using a 26000 as source will cause severe degradation not just in resolution but also degradation in sharpness because the default interpolator is not supposed to do this.
You have to reduce the size first in photoshop and I also recomend you to change the interpolator in the Pano2VR preferences to Lanczoes 3 or Blackmann Sinc. The conversion will take 3 times longer at least but you get max quality.
The 2880x2880 maximum is a maximum size Adobe seems to have claimed once for Flash 9 but from the tests we made with FPP I can tell you that it is not true.
You can see panoramas with FPP at cubeface sizes as large as 6000x6000 but you need the latest supercomputer and a lot of Ram.
Actually what sets the max is also the browser as they are not at all supposed to handle this sizes.
I recommend not using larger then 2400x2400 as that is what you can see with 512mb ram also in Explorer which is very bad handling large sizes.
The only way to see large panoramas like this in flash is to use KRpano tiling technics which only loads the tiles you see. If the browser can not keep them in memory it unloads the tiles you do not currently see in the window.
You may also know that Quicktime can not show these large sizes either if you do not have the memory. However Quicktime has a built in quality reduction which automatically reduces quality if you show it on a computer which does not have the memory.
Hans
www.panoramas.dk
