Designing Airports - Tips and Tricks

Not telling you anything... but keeping the lenses nodal point constant is necessary to get rid of the blur. You never get the resolution right until you do that.

Of course, you can get something into Real Flight that will work. I just gave up on that after some lousy results.
 
When you first start the field there is no sign of a photo in the field in the overhead view. I assume I'll need to place a few trees at known distances from the pilot spawn to start the layout. Wouldn't it be cool to be able to overlay that Google overhead in there and orient and scale it as a template for the field. That would take all of the guess work out of it and produce a very accurate field.
 
I got the full version of ptgui this morning and the nodel ninja is in the brown truck. I managed to get a pano into RF of the wingmasters field without the ninga, it's got some errors but it's good enough to experiment with. The first thing that stood out was the scale was all wrong. I had done some measurements and place a few primitives around at known distances from the pilot spawn and they appear at about a quarter of the distance I was expecting to see. RF is too small or the pano is too big. Anyone know what's going on?
 
Now you need to fiddle with your horizon.
If its too low aircraft will appear bigger and run out of runway or hit obstacles sooner.
Too high then the opposite.
Sometimes if you were not perfectly level while panning around, one end of the field will appear to be of different scale than the other.
Enough fiddling, you'll need to find a compromise if a reshoot is not possible.
 
flexible I did not know you had a nodal ninja ....you should try our local park
I have a nice 12.1 MP camera I can lend if you need it
 
I can tilt the horrizon on two axis but I haven't found a setting to raise or lower (Zaxis) The stitching software does allow you to alter the horizon though.
 
In a perfect world, yes the horizon should be exactly centered on a completely "flat" field.
Add landmark and terrain, then you need to play a bit up/down a few pixels since it will get confused as to where your center really is.
Stitching software isn't perfect and may add some skew to your pano.
I've often compiled a pano more than once trying different error thresholds with different results.
Unfortunately, what works for one pano field will not work for another, so be prepared to tweak you stitching software and deviate from defaults.
 
Thanks Phrank, I've got a lot to learn about all this stuff. I just couldn't wait to get something in the sim to try it out. It's pretty slow learning things just tweaking settings and seeing what changed. When I get the ninja and get a real good pano that doesn't require much input from me to stitch I'll experiment with the horrizon features in ptgui.
 
You have to use photo editing software to move the horizon up or down to the middle of the picture.. you can use FREE Gimp (yes another free program) to do it. Just add to the frame size and move the whole picture content down if you need to, or add blank space at bottom if you need... keep a 2 to 1 ratio (width vs height or close) at all times.

That is why I take two rows of portrait pictures, one row the horizon is at the very top, and the other row the horizon is at the very bottom... It accomplishes three things with one at bat... 1) the horizon is centered, 2) it give the stitching software something consistent to stitch together, and 3) it takes far fewer pictures to shoot portrait. You just rotate in one step in ptgui. (not free)

You also need to investigate the camera, mine has a pano mode that keeps focal length and aperture the same throughout the sequence. You might have to use a manual mode to achieve the same effect.
 
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You are able to get full coverage top to bottom with two rows or still need a straight up and straight down shot to complete the sphere?
 
Two rows of 6 shots. 30 degrees up and 30 degrees down. Zenith (Straight up) Nadere (Straight down) 14 shots total. That is if your using a narrower telephoto lens. Wider lens can be done with 1 row every 90 degrees one shot up one shot down, but the results are much lower resolution. The first method yields the best results for your purposes.
 
6 shots! , with a narrow tele photo? , for a 360 ?...............something doesn't sound right !:confused: even if your shooting landscape vs. portrait
I usually need at least 6 for a 180 with a "normal" lens
 
Exact number shots and rows highly depends on your camera lens! :D
A safe rule of thumb is to use 20-30% overlap between adjacent shots and rows.

A higher quality wide angle prime lens will allow you to take less rows/pics per row but at a huge $$cost$$.
Your point and shoot variety wide angle zoom setting can get you close, but the big disadvantage are the high chromatic and distortion at the edges of each shot.
The sweet spot for such a camera would be about 1/3 from widest angle.
That will make the quantity of shots higher.

Experiment and find what works for YOUR gear and you.

Your tripod legs and shadows can be photoshopped out, but the straight overhead shot must be taken right after your upper row if the clouds are moving.

Most importantly lock in your exposure settings if you have manual override.
 
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This is all great stuff guys, thanks My camera is a 14MP point and shoot that I can lock everything but auto focus. It has 10x optical zoom. Using Phranks formula, on the next shoot I'll try 2 to 3x of zoom and see what happens. Ninga gets here Wednesday.
 
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I prefer the middle of the road ...a lens set to "Wide" t begins distort strait lines and can exaggerate parallax

A lens set to tele or slightly zoomed from what is considered Normal begins to compress the image .....making things further away in the back ground seem closer to an object in the fore ground than it actually is

what focal length is "normal" .... that depends on the format ( no I'm not referring to file type)

In the old days "format" referred to the size of the negative
a "normal" lens ...one that gives similar perspective as your eye (I'm not talking of field of view here) for a 35mm format camera it right around is 50mm
My medium format Hasselblad had a format or negative size of 2 1/4" x2 1/4" and it's "normal" lens was an 80mm

how are these numbers arrived @ that would take way more explanation than I planned on doing here .......basically it has to do with optics and whats known as the image circle

So to determine whats "normal" for a digital camera really depends on the size of its Image chip ...and that varies widely from camera to camera ....so there is not really a hard and fast answer to that question as there once was with film cameras
For my G9 I find , its in the middle of its zoom range


Hasselbald has/had a 2 1/4 (film) camera known as the SWc (Super Wide Camera) it has a Ziess lens that takes distortion -less pics at a normal perspective but has the same field of view as human eyes just under 180...... bonus is that it also "Sees just under 180 vertically too !....its the only camera in the world that can take a high res. wide angle distortion-less photo ..... in one shot.......... think about it ......thats a completely distortion less 360 pano in 4 shots ! :eek: if you scanned them into digital ....you could make perfect panos with any basic photo editor :D
 
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