A few simple tips for those developing their own custom presets:
http://trac.gbiloba.org/papywizard/wiki … tompresets

1. Set up your camera/lens for which you are developing a custom preset at the NPP and then use Papywizard with motor speed set to slow to move the head to check max. angle you can achieve when attempting to point camera at the zenith before the camera body/rail hits the Merlin head. Then avoid setting a pitch position greater than this in the  custom preset.

2. If you think there's a risk of your camera/rail hitting the Merlin head because of the shooting positions defined in the custom preset then test shoot in Step-by-step mode so you can stop the shoot before this happens.

3. Set your camera to the lowest resolution available when test shooting a custom preset - that way you will get an image set that stitches and renders more quickly but is adequate for testing overlaps and scene coverage.

Last edited by mediavets (2009-01-17 13:29:17)

GURL wrote:

4 - Use the editor Move tool (  http://www.autopano.net/wiki/images-en/ … de_off.png   ) to see what would result from other source images arrangements (the corresponding pano will be meaningless but the yellow boundaries will show whether or not overlaps are large enough and whether there are some holes - you can even remove or add some source images.)

Yes, but because APPs Editor grid view shows Yaw values as it does (negative values 0 to -180 to the left of 0/0 and 0 to +180 to right of 0/0) it is hard to translate those values to the 0 to 360 style used by Papywizard presets.

For the same reason it's hard to move orphaned images from image sets shot using a preset with Merlin+Papywizard into position by manual entry of Y/P values in Move mode even if you have the preset Y/P values to hand.

I know it is simple arithmetic but I'm one of those who is 'arithmetically challenged' - is there such a term as a 'numerophobe'?

If you also have a manual pano head then it's easiest just to 'translate' a shooting technique that works on the manual head - reading Y and P values from the scales on the manual head rotators - directly to a custom preset for Papywizard.

Last edited by mediavets (2009-01-17 16:49:01)

fma38 wrote:

Andrew, you can use -180/180; instead of 0/360, in presets. The head is capable to make 8 turns in each directions before the encoder overflow (but the display may garbage values > 999.999). The only drawback if you start to -180, is that the head will do half a turn before starting. As for a full spherical, initial position does not matter, I always start at 0 in presets, so it is faster on the field.

I always start at zero in presets for the same resaon.

Using a mix of positive and negative values in presets would drive me nuts I think - of course many think I'm nuts already.

Instead I'd like it if the APP Editor grid could optionally be set to 0/360 range.

With a Nodal Ninja 5L pano head it's quicker for me to 'model' presets on that than by using dummy images and Move mode in the APP Editor.  Georges is very clever and competent with that technique but I think I would find it more challenging.

For me it seems to be quicker and easier just to make a trial preset - perhaps intitially using the data from the VRwave panoramic photography lens database - (http://www.vrwave.com/panoramic/photogr … abase.html) - and doing a test shoot/stitch.