This is the start of a more in depth guide from what was described in the Editing the Virtual Easter Egg Hunt post. In this part I will focus on creating the panorama that is needed. For the virtual Easter egg hunt there are two panoramas, but a single panorama is more than enough to learn the skills.
Taking the Pictures
To get the largest field of view it is best to create the panorama from a sequence of pictures stitched together. This section will focus on what tools are needed and what steps to take to take the pictures to be used for the panorama. Once the pictures have been taken we will walk through the steps for stitching them into a panorama.
What You Will Need
- Camera: The better the quality the better the end result.
- Location: The place you want to take a panorama of.
- Tripod: Optional but very helpful. Ideally one where tilt is above the pan.
- Eggs: If you are trying to recreate the Virtual Easter Egg Hunt.
Setup the Location
To get all the pictures needed you will need to make multiple passed with the camera tilted at different angles. The panoramas for the Virtual Easter Egg Hunt were made from about 27 images each. In order to get the best look, and make it easier for the software to stitch the images together, a stable base for the camera is key. Also important is having a stable subject to photograph. Since the panorama takes multiple images over multiple passes having something move from one pass to the next can lead to some odd artifacts in the image.
Below is an example of the tripod and camera setup that can be used to easily take pictures for a panorama.
Egg Placement
If you are planning to recreate the Easter Egg Hunt some thought has to be put into placing the eggs. The first step is in finding out how far away from the camera you can place your eggs and still be able to see them. The easiest way to do this is to set up a staggered line of eggs in front of your camera setup and take a picture. From this picture you can see at what point the eggs become unrecognizable. The following diagram shows how to set up the eggs to test your camera.
The end result will give you an image like the one below. From the picture you can determine how far away you can place the eggs and still be able to see them clear enough to find them.
Taking the Pictures
When taking the pictures I did it in three horizontal stripes. As each picture is taken working around a stripe it is important to keep an overlap of 30-40% from picture to picture. This overlap makes sure there is enough information for the software to be able to stitch the pictures together. There also must be 30-40% overlap between each stripe.
In the picture below the individual pictures are represented by the yellow, red, and blue boxes. You can see how there is overlap both side to side and up and down.
The amount of pictures needed to get the required overlap depends on both the camera and lens being used. For the camera and lens combination I used it meant there would be nine images per stripe for 27 total images per panorama. In most cases there are more pictures due to not getting perfect even movements. This did leave a “hole” in the photo-sphere in both the straight up and straight down directions, but that was not important for the Easter egg hunt.
Stitching the Pictures Together
Once you have your collection of images the next step is creating the panorama from them. For that task we will be using Hugin. This program makes it easy to create a panorama by automatically handling the alignment and stitching
Image Import
To get started you will need to import the images into Hugin. The order and names of the images doesn’t matter since the alignment will be done by looking for overlap.
Once uploaded you will need to update the focal length and multiplier if it isn’t correctly detected. This is based on the camera and lens used to take the photos.
Image Alignment
Now comes the somewhat time consuming part of the process. Click on the alignment button and prepare to wait. The time needed for Hugin to work out the proper alignment is based on the image size, number of images, and your computers processing power. The larger the images, the more images, and less computing power the longer the process will take. The example panorama in this guide took 7 minutes with 32 images that are 7.45MB on a machine with a i9-9900k Processor.
Rotate and Crop
Once the alignment has completed you will be shown a preview of the end result. In almost every case for me the image was upside down. To fix that the image needed to be rolled by 180 degrees.
The last step before exporting was to crop the image to remove rounded artifacts. The autocrop function does a good job at that automatically.
Exporting the Panorama
Now that the image has been rotated and cropped as needed it just needs to be exported. This is where you will need to set the width to 14440px, the height will auto-adjust.
Next Steps
In the next part we will be going over setting up a basic page to allow for displaying and interacting with the panorama at a basic level.