360 Panorama

[spacewizard]

Sharing another 360 panorama shot on the Neo!

Handmade DJI Neo pano of a snowy park with a bridge over a creek

Handmade DJI Neo pano of a snowy park with a bridge over a creek

kuula.co

 

[Chrislaf]

Sharing another 360 panorama shot on the Neo!

Handmade DJI Neo pano of a snowy park with a bridge over a creek

Handmade DJI Neo pano of a snowy park with a bridge over a creek

kuula.co

All that work paid off! That turned out pretty good.

It’s amazing what can be done with a US$179 drone.

Chris

 

[spacewizard]

Thanks!

One thing that's a bit of a bummer is that the sky cuts off very low. I completely forgot to tilt the gimbal up and get more sky in, as I'd intended to. Luckily the sky is so monochromatic it's not that noticeable.

 

[Chrislaf]

Thanks!

One thing that's a bit of a bummer is that the sky cuts off very low. I completely forgot to tilt the gimbal up and get more sky in, as I'd intended to. Luckily the sky is so monochromatic it's not that noticeable.

If you want, I can run your images through PTGui Pro and see how it does. It has a fill gaps selection that should work well for an overcast day. You would just have to upload them to something like Google Drive and share the link with me.

Chris

 

[spacewizard]

That'd be great - I can upload the original TIF. Will DM.

 

[Chrislaf]

That'd be great - I can upload the original TIF. Will DM.

I will be interesting to see how PTGui Pro does with your images so you can compare.

Chris

 

[spacewizard]

One more Neo panorama -- this is literally nothing but a parking lot.

The parking lot was mostly empty when I started flying around but there happened to be an even there and it filled with cars while I was there. Just for the heck of it I tried doing a pano. I took three rows of pics, one straight out, one high, one low, and a nadir. I missed a bit on the bottom and a lot on the top and filled them in in GIMP.

I only needed to do a little manual work in Hugin to get them to stitch successfully, which was amazing, given how much of a pain it's been sometimes in the past!

Let me stress again: this is a super boring thing to take a picture of. It's just a parking lot. But I was happy to get it to stitch so successfully so I thought I'd share, just as part of the general "let's prove that a Neo can do panos despite totally not being designed for that sort of thing" theme.

Just a parking lot, experimenting with doing panos with the Neo

Just a parking lot, experimenting with doing panos with the Neo

kuula.co

 

[Chrislaf]

Did some more experimenting with 360 panos on the NEO in a complex environment with objects close to the NEO. Here is a 360 pano taken about 1.5m above the ground underneath tree branches. There are a number of stitching errors but I was surprised at how well it turned out. Used PTGui Pro to stitch 100 images.

Chris

Kuula Link - Pano under tree branches

View attachment TinyPlanet NEO Pano under branches.jpg

 

[spacewizard]

Did some more experimenting with 360 panos on the NEO in a complex environment with objects close to the NEO. Here is a 360 pano taken about 1.5m above the ground underneath tree branches. There are a number of stitching errors but I was surprised at how well it turned out. Used PTGui Pro to stitch 100 images.

Chris

Kuula Link - Pano under tree branches

View attachment 1200

Oh that is really nice and cozy, the pano. And the tiny planet is crazy looking!

 

[Chrislaf]

Oh that is really nice and cozy, the pano. And the tiny planet is crazy looking!

Yeah, it interesting what your eye sees and how you perceive it and then how it turns out from the camera.

I sure wish there was some way to automate the pano process on the NEO to take advantage of the wide angle lens.

Chris

 

[spacewizard]

Yeah, it interesting what your eye sees and how you perceive it and then how it turns out from the camera.

I sure wish there was some way to automate the pano process on the NEO to take advantage of the wide angle lens.

Chris

Agreed

 

[spacewizard]

Hey it's 360 pano time again!

This one was taken crazy high -- almost 400 feet above a little park.

I messed around a lot trying to get the colors decent looking in GIMP. The bright side of the sky still kind of looks like crap, if you look in the other direction, but it's not bad facing this way.

20250503-neo-high-pano-shrunk-for-kuula

20250503-neo-high-pano-shrunk-for-kuula

kuula.co

The stitching process wasn't bad at all. I used Hugin. The "Simple Interface" alignment didn't do a good job for me, so I went to the Advanced interface and used the Optimize Positions button, telling it to optimize for "Positions And View" (*not* "Incremental, Starting at Anchor") and that did the trick. A little manual sliding around back in the Simple Interface's "Move and Drag" tab and I was good.

 

[Chrislaf]

Hey it's 360 pano time again!

This one was taken crazy high -- almost 400 feet above a little park.

I messed around a lot trying to get the colors decent looking in GIMP. The bright side of the sky still kind of looks like crap, if you look in the other direction, but it's not bad facing this way.

20250503-neo-high-pano-shrunk-for-kuula

20250503-neo-high-pano-shrunk-for-kuula

kuula.co

The stitching process wasn't bad at all. I used Hugin. The "Simple Interface" alignment didn't do a good job for me, so I went to the Advanced interface and used the Optimize Positions button, telling it to optimize for "Positions And View" (*not* "Incremental, Starting at Anchor") and that did the trick. A little manual sliding around back in the Simple Interface's "Move and Drag" tab and I was good.

That turned out great especially from ‘way up there’ where wind could be a big problem with getting a good stitch.

Chris

 

[spacewizard]

Thanks! yeah, I got very lucky on the wind.

 

[GFields]

Looks great

 

[spacewizard]

One more pano!

I had blown the battery on my Flip, which always makes awesome panos easily, and I still wanted to take one of this dam. So I busted out the Neo and took way more pictures than I needed to (56), and got this!

Obviously I was setting myself up for parallax issues with all those wires. Any movement of the drone (and there was a bit of wind) would cause the wires to move against the background and break during stitching.

I might have been able to get rid of some of those parallax issues by removing some of the many redundant images I had, but it's fine. I put in a ton of work in Hugin adding extra control points already. Calling this good enough -- except for the broken wires I think it looks great!

20250510-electric-dam-kuula

20250510-electric-dam-kuula

kuula.co

 

[Chrislaf]

That looks great! Wires are always hard to deal with even on the more expensive drones too.

How do you like your Flip compared to the NEO since they overlap in a lot of ways?

Chris

 

[spacewizard]

I love that I can just pack up either in any old bag and take them places, and that they're very low effort to just pull out and start using. They can both launch and land on your hand and do quick shots without a controller. The Flip is obviously a lot bulkier, you can't just slip it in a bag and forget it's there like the Neo.

The Flip camera is *WAY* better, just absolutely gorgeous.. (1/1.3" sensor!) And it does have the auto pano feature, and the pano photos it takes almost always stitch flawlessly in Hugin on the first try, with no manual effort.

It also picks up satellites way faster, it's never randomly started wandering on me like the Neo has. Its wind resistance is better but still not super awesome. It moves and accelerates way faster.

Obviously it was a bit more expensive, $430 for the drone plus controller, where the Neo was $330 for the drone plus controller. I have an extra battery for the Neo, because it was like $40, whereas I have not sprung for an extra Flip battery, because they're like $80. So I have better total battery life on the Neo although the Flip has longer life on a single battery.

The Flip is a better drone in every way *except* for the neo being so small and convenient (and strangely charming). For all that the Flip is more dependable I can't help still liking the Neo a lot. And obviously I'm even using it to do things it's "bad" at (panospheres).

Obviously, the Neo has a whole world of FPV which the Flip can't access at all, but I don't have an FPV controller. If I ever get a controller and goggles, that will open up a whole new world of possibilities with the Neo.