Creating Spherical Panoramas - Tips and tricks
- Thread starter dcoonich
- Start date
What I *want* is an automated way to take the photos. Having the drone stitch them for you is fine and all but I don't care that much and am happy to do it myself.
But they can't really sell people on the feature unless the drone stitches the panos itself, and that is probably more than they can make a simple little Neo do easily. So, those of us who just need automated picture taking don't get it, even though it would be trivial to implement, because the complete feature would be non-trivial to implement.
If only there were some way to just program it with a series of moves and shots. A scripting language we could use. That would be enough. Not likely to ever happen.
I remember years ago there was (still is) this wonderful third party firmware hack for Canon point-and-shoots called "CHDK". It could do intervalometers, exposure or focus bracketing, anything you wanted. That's the kind of thing it would be awesome to see for DJI drones someday. (I don't know if it'd even be possible, I'm sure it would be a massive amount of difficult work for someone to create it.... but it's the kind of thing that would unlock so much potential if it existed.)
Chrislaf
Well-Known Member
Me too! I never use the built in stitching the drone does other than as a preview of what the pano will look like.
Agreed.
If the NEO had the ability to do Waypoints it might be possible. Wes Barris over at MavicPilots has a pano creator that uses DJI Waypoints to create panos.
Chris
There are some solid rumors of a Neo 2 from some of the reliable leakers, maybe it will have some features like this.
I'm hoping the plan is to keep selling the neo with the same target, and produce a higher end version with the same whoop design, with upgrades like I've discussed in other threads here.
Chrislaf
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For the heck of it I decided to use the neo to take a pano of my messy basement from a height of about 4 feet. I took about 45 pictures. I didn't use a system of taking pictures in the cardinal directions systematically like I do sometimes, I just tried to get overlap by eyeball.
My first attempts putting them through Hugin were disappointing. I couldn't seem to get alignment no matter what I did. There were some disconnected groups, which I tried with at most moderate success to connect via control points. Finally I ended up adding a ton of verticals manually and deleting several pictures that weren't well connected with anything -- and suddenly it all worked! Specifically, after using the "beginner's mode" interface and using the "align" button. Not the geometry alignment button in the advanced interface.
Just out of curiosity, I decided to try again from scratch. This time, I excluded the disconnected pictures from the start. I hit "align" in the beginner's interface.... not great results, not as bad as the first time but not great. I tried just hitting "align" again... and it got better. Damn near perfect. Hit it again, and it was as good as the first one where I'd spent a ton of time manually creating verticals!
So moral of this story for me I guess, is get rid of truly badly connected images, and button-mash "align" a couple times in beginner mode.
I have to say I am pretty stunned by how good a stitch this is, especially because the neo was literally just a foot or two away from some large objects, you'd think there would be bad parallax effects but there absolutely wasn't.
I do have a couple black polygons where I didn't get good overlap towards the floor. And I don't have zenith coverage at all. (The ceiling images were the ones that I just could not connect -- too few landmarks) But overall I'm really psyched about these results, and I hope I can use it out in the world to take some kinda similar neat picture that I actually want to show the world -- unlike my messy basement, which is not for public view.
My first attempts putting them through Hugin were disappointing. I couldn't seem to get alignment no matter what I did. There were some disconnected groups, which I tried with at most moderate success to connect via control points. Finally I ended up adding a ton of verticals manually and deleting several pictures that weren't well connected with anything -- and suddenly it all worked! Specifically, after using the "beginner's mode" interface and using the "align" button. Not the geometry alignment button in the advanced interface.
Just out of curiosity, I decided to try again from scratch. This time, I excluded the disconnected pictures from the start. I hit "align" in the beginner's interface.... not great results, not as bad as the first time but not great. I tried just hitting "align" again... and it got better. Damn near perfect. Hit it again, and it was as good as the first one where I'd spent a ton of time manually creating verticals!
So moral of this story for me I guess, is get rid of truly badly connected images, and button-mash "align" a couple times in beginner mode.
I have to say I am pretty stunned by how good a stitch this is, especially because the neo was literally just a foot or two away from some large objects, you'd think there would be bad parallax effects but there absolutely wasn't.
I do have a couple black polygons where I didn't get good overlap towards the floor. And I don't have zenith coverage at all. (The ceiling images were the ones that I just could not connect -- too few landmarks) But overall I'm really psyched about these results, and I hope I can use it out in the world to take some kinda similar neat picture that I actually want to show the world -- unlike my messy basement, which is not for public view.
Chrislaf
Well-Known Member
Glad to hear you were able to get a pretty good stitch. The NEO’s ultra wide lens works well in these kind of situations but I find I have to be careful with the overlap for things close to the lens.
Chris
Chris
I went out today and did another Neo photosphere -- posted it in the thread in the user photos section.
It was SUCH A PAIN trying to get Hugin to put that thing together in an at all acceptable fashion. Just beat my head against it for a couple hours, trying different things.
In the end what helped was, telling it to find more and more and more automated control points, throw in a few manual when I had to, get rid of incorrect vertical control point pairs that it threw in there accidentally, and - I had to use advanced mode for this -- make sure it was *not* doing an "exposure fusion" which it really really wanted to do for some reason? Anyway the end product has a few stitch errors but not much, and I was happy enough with it to post here.
It was SUCH A PAIN trying to get Hugin to put that thing together in an at all acceptable fashion. Just beat my head against it for a couple hours, trying different things.
In the end what helped was, telling it to find more and more and more automated control points, throw in a few manual when I had to, get rid of incorrect vertical control point pairs that it threw in there accidentally, and - I had to use advanced mode for this -- make sure it was *not* doing an "exposure fusion" which it really really wanted to do for some reason? Anyway the end product has a few stitch errors but not much, and I was happy enough with it to post here.
Chrislaf
Well-Known Member
A few years ago, I purchased PTGui Pro (long time user of regular version) which has an algorithm for automatic optimum seam placement which I find helps in difficult to stitch panos. That’s what I have been using with my NEO panos. It’s overkill for most NEO users since it costs more than double what the NEO cost but I have had good luck with it.
Chris
whoo, yeah, I can't imagine dropping $375 on a stitcher, but it sounds like you get a lot for your money.
Chrislaf
Well-Known Member
Yeah, it wasn’t as much a few years ago but still expensive. I use it for not only drone panos but also panos shot with my DSLRs.
Chris
