2. Pano Stiching
The final Pano shots. Do not download the images below. Use this link (it’s 123mb) to download the actual source if you want to follow this tutorial. Using the below resized images, even after clicking the image for the larger ones are resized ones, will not work in PTGui.
The following are pitch +45 degrees, one shot every 30 degrees turn of the pano head. Total 12 shots.
The following are pitch -30 degrees, one shot every 30 degrees turn of the pano head. Total 12 shots too.
The below is the nadir. The ground photo that will be used to cover the tripod.
Start PTGui
Feed all the images you have downloaded, I presume you have unzipped them into a folder, feed them all EXCEPT the nadir.JPG into PTGui. Feed the images by dragging and dropping them. It’s a real time saver.
Let PTGui load all the images individually, sit back and relax when done, you will see the following.
Click on “Rotate”
Then click on “Advance”
Now click on “Generate control points…” and watch the status run…
After generating, you’ll see the below. A nicely generated equirectangular image. Nice. Note that at times, if you did not take the photos properly or when PTGui is unable to detect control points, you will have to tell it manually where in image A is the same as where in image B but that’s for another tutorial. Don’t worry about that too much for the time being as most of the time, the resulting equirectangular image will be generated nicely.
Optimising
It’s important to optimise as PTGui will help us make the equirectangular image better by taking away some minor errors it can detect on it’s own.
To do that, click on the “Control Point Assistant” then “Control point table”
Highlight the top say 25 to 40 lines of control points then press Delete on your keyboard. DELETE it. Don’t worry, delete it.
After deleting, you see under “Distance” of the Control Point Table it won’t be the 70+ figure anymore but a 20.21 figure. Nope, you have not optimise yet so, you move…
… to the “Optimizer”. Click Advance and select everything.
Choose Run Optimizer. Don’t worry about the pop up. Click ok.
A status bar will pop up while the Optimizer does it’s work. Then the Results.
Click ok and keep going. Repeat the deleting then Optimising of the image. I generating stop when the lowest value is around 1.5
Next you will notice the equirectangular image in has sort of wrapped a little, click on the “straighten panorama” button
Now to great the final out put. We’ll be generating the equirectangular image now. Click on “Create Panorama” then enter 5000 as the width. The Height will automatically be change to 2500 pixel. Click on Browse to choose where to save this image to. And “Create Panorama!”
That’s it. You have a equirectangular image that you can use to generate a 360 pano!
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