Best way to create 360 images for VR projects

[Jeff_McKune]

I want to create more VR projects and I am trying to find out the best way to create the images for Captivate VR projects.  What projection is best:  Cylindrical, circular fisheye?  What cameras work best:  GoPro Max, Ricoh, others?  What is the best stitching software for 360 photos?  Does anyone have experience with PTGui (www.ptgui.com) for stitching photos together for Captivate VR projects?  I am hoping that someone has discussed this, but I have not found a good thread yet.

[kdmemory]

Hi Jeff Mckune

Interesting subject, and, although I can't give a satisfactory advise, I'm responding to you because I'm intrigued by trying out VR projects in Captivate myself. And this way I get this onto My Follows list and when I know more I'll come back and tell you about my research in this field.
I am thinking of using my LinkedIn account to get in contact with pros or semi-pros who are practicing VR respectively omnidirectional photography. To initiate some form of collaboration.

Maybe this page on Wikipedia on VR Photography gives you a first entry point. I found it quite helpful to learn that when you want to stitch a number of photos to a 360 panorama that you should mount a camera (any camera really) in portrait position on a tripod and rotate the camera and make an image every 30 degrees.
I can't tell you anything about PTGui stitching software but it certainly looks promising. BAFAIK Photoshop offers a stitching routine as well. I'll try that very soon.

Well so much for now, good luck with your efforts

Klaus

[kdmemory]

Hi Jeff

one more thing: When using Photoshop for stitching a series of images, this Adobe Photoshop User Guide might be of help.

Klaus

[Jeff_McKune]

Klaus and all,

I did learn that PTGui works quite well for creating 360 images for use in Adobe Captivate.  You can use a DSLR, a GoPro, or whatever camera you want.  A tripod is a necessity.  Their website provides a good video on eliminating parallax which can make the stitching not very clean.  However, I tried it with a Hero8 Black camera.  Because the camera is so narrow, the parallax center point was pretty much where the camera mounted on the tripod.  I shot 16 images overlapping at least 30% for each image.  It took about a minute.  I then added the images to PTGui.  It figured out the correct order for the images and stitched them perfectly.  As PTGui can output several different panoramic projections, I selected 360x180 2:1 equirectangular images.  The program merged stitched and projected the single image, saving it as a JPEG.  I was impressed by how fast it processed the images.  The result was an image that could be directly added to a Captivate VR project, ready for hotspots and other elements.  The learning curve was low for getting started, but there are lots of more advanced features.  Nice piece of software, great support, reasonably priced, and a great add-on for Captivate for creating VR projects.

[kdmemory]

Thank you, Jeff, for sharing your experiences.

I've got a few questions and a favour to ask:

• Where did you take your images? (outdoors or indoors)
• Did you have objects on different depth levels in your shot? (like people walking across your camera angle)
• What's the pixel size and ratio of your PTGui processed panorama image?
• You probably used manual mode for focus and other settings (like exposure time, aperture and so on). Have you?
• And here's the favour to ask: Can you (kindly) supply a small reproduction as image here of your resulting equirectangular pano-result? I mean, not full size, 500 pixels wide maybe? It would help to get a better idea.

advanced thanks

Klaus

[Jeff_McKune]

Klaus,

I took the images indoors in my study.  Yes, there were chairs that were closer to the camera and items on the walls or in the next room that were farther from the camera.  The resulting 360 image is 12,614 x 6307 pixels, at 10.4 megabytes on disk.  Photoshop reports "Pixel Dimensions" as 227.6M.  Actually, since I was using a GoPro and had watched the video on the PTGui website on parallax calibration, I just had the GoPro Hero8 set at "Superphoto" and shot away.  Even with windows on one side of the room, there was uniform brightness in the resulting image.  

Rather than post a picture of my study, let me share an outdoor picture that one of the tech support reps sent to me so that I could test a resulting image in Captivate prior to purchase.  The image that is attached should be the same dimensions.  However, I saved the image at a JPEG picture quality of 8 which makes the file size small enough to post.  I don't know if the forum posting mechanism will downsample the file or not.  Hopefully it will give you something to try.  I believe this is from the Netherlands, which is where New House Internet Services, the makers of PTGui, are located.

[EgyptianSun]

Hey Jeff,

Like you,   I have been creating panos for a while now using equirectangular as the final format and stitching with PtGUI. In the last few days, I started to explore Adobe Animate for publishing these panos in HTML. I ran into an issue where the pano size is too big for Adobe Animate which would cut off a good portion on one end. and ruin continuity of the pano I have yet to determine if it is the size of the file or the dimensions of the pano. For example, the original is 9616 x 4808, and the cutoff exists. I resized to 2400 x 1200 and the cutoff did not appear but the quality was reduced significantly. I need more testing to find the optimal size.

Regarding equipment, I am using a Nikon D5100 DX with an 8mm Sigma Fisheye mounted on a pano ninja pano head.

Have you run into a size limit on Captivate?

Articulate's storyline 360 did not have a size limit if I recall correctly.

[Jeff_McKune]

EgyptianSun and Klaus,

I just realized I had not replied to Klaus - my apologies, so I will respond to you both.  PTGui seems to be a very capable product, but it turned out to be so much simpler to just purchase a GoPro Max camera that will shoot a great 360-degree pano in one shot.  Images work perfectly in Adobe Captivate.  This solution has allowed me to focus on virtual reality content and not get so bogged down in the details of assembling the pano images, which had been frustrating me.  I still have my PTGui license, but have not used the product since getting my GoPro Max.  I hope this is helpful.