Implemented
Claus Miksch
I have a background in construction and engineering ventures. For my first project, I elected to create a tour of a local park. The park is approximately 105 acres. I plan to keep my sections to around 150 panoramic photos each.
Simply:
1. Will I be able to add sections and link them together as I cover different additional areas of the park?
2.Do you have any additional insights to the proper way of approaching a tour of this size?
I don't think Cupix supports GPS yet (although I hear they plan to) which would be helpful for you given you are outdoors. The advantage of Cupix is that they position the locations and orientate for you without the use of GPS. In order to do that enough photos need to be present for the photogrammetry to work. At 105 acres you would need a ton of photos to cover it all (think of a 6' x 6' grid where a photo is taken at every intersection). My guess is you are just getting small points of interests throughout the park. You can manually link them together afterwards or use hotspots to jump to the other areas. If you are really trying to cover the entire area, I would use the Street View App from Google because they support GPS which will give you the locations. You would still have to link them together afterwards on the App but you can jump greater distances without the need of having so many photos. .I would suggest reading up on photogrammetry if you are new to all this as it will allow you to understand how many photos are needed depending on the complexity of the environment.
Hi, Claus.
Thanks for reaching out. First of all, we recommend uploading about100 photos for each section to get the result faster. Also, select 'Photos are for the civil survey' that uses the GPS information of the photos when you upload and turn off 'Generate the 3D model' option.
As for the questions,
1. Yes, you are able to combine sections together. You can create multiple sections when you upload photos or create several 3D tours and move the sections in each 3D tour. Then you can manually connect each section.
You can watch this video for more details on how to link sections - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=drsRQWALxNo
2. Mount the camera on your helmet and set the camera to an interval shooting mode(4~5sec). Then stop every 3~5 steps. This method is used to capture a significant scale site such as a construction site or a park. You can refer to this video. https://www.youtube.com/edit?video_referrer=watch&video_id=hodFpVHyzEg
Best Regards,
Cupix Support
Hi, Devin.
Thanks for writing in and sorry for the late reply. For some reason, your post was categorized in other section, and we couldn't check it till now.
We do support GPS if it's outdoors. It's easier to position the locations of a camera if you have the GPS data from a camera, and that's why it's even more challenging to process photos were taken indoors because it makes server solely depends on common features between photos to map them together. We focus more on indoor 3D tours when we first started the business, and even though all the photos already have the GPS information but we didn't use it because the information isn't accurate when it comes to the indoor photos. We've recently added an option that you can click on when you upload photos to create a 3D tour of outdoors for the purpose of the civil survey. If you check this option, it doesn't create a 3D mesh; instead, it uses the GPS information map photos based on that data which allow you to take less photos to cover a huge area.
Best Regards,
Cupix Support
Hi everyone,
I’m still working on creating a walk-through of a local park. In this last effort, I disabled the 3D mesh option and selected civil survey. Additionally, I renamed the photos corresponding to the order of each pano view and checked to make sure that the GPS information was contained in each photo. On checking the overview of the project, the first thing I noticed was that Cupix arbitrarily chose to group certain photos into “ANC sections.” ANC 1 contained 4 photos and ANC 2 contained 3. The rest (there are 15 in all) were individual panos. This brings me to my first question. Why? Is there a provision to break these panos out of the sections Cupix has chosen?
Working on the grid, I simply moved these ANC sections out of the way temporarily and started creating my walk-through by positioning my first pano (001) at the intersection of 0-X & 0-Y. I then rotated the enclosing section of pano 001 to match the view I wanted when starting the walk-through and locked the position.
Moving on to pano 002, I moved the enclosing section to 25-X & 0-Y (roughly the position as viewed from position 001) and rotated the section. I used the “Use this viewpoint at opening” in the publisher tab to the view I wanted and locked the position. When I selected Review, the second position was correct, but the viewpoint wouldn’t change. I tried it several times but could not get the viewpoint to update in the review tab. This is kind of disorienting to a viewer (not to mention myself). This is a prevalent issue with all the link positions and the viewpoints throughout the process of manually creating a walk-through. Is it me? It’s difficult to position the next link position when having to constantly view it from the last position.
I appreciate that Cupix is designed as an internal mapping program and I’m probably asking for things that are outside the parameters of its purpose. However, it would be great if the manual mapping was streamlined to be a little more intuitive. As for the GPS coordinates, all the links that were created by Cupix are positioned evenly along the X axis. I selected the civil survey option when uploading the files, but I couldn’t see that it made any difference when looking at the resulting grid.
Please don’t view me as a “pesky nit-pickier.” I think Cupix is a great program and I would love to see it become the go-to platform for all us photo mappers -both indoors and out. I’ll keep working this.
Hi, Claus.
First of all, we apologize for your inconvenience. We've checked your 3D tour, and it has some complicated technical issues, and they will be fixed by next week. Once we fixed them, we'll recalculate your 3D tours in our server and send it back to you. We do appreciate your feedback, and it helps a lot to improve our service. So feel free to leave us your opinion.
To briefly explain the cause of your problem, currently, the civil survey option is not working, and the server failed to import the GPS data from your photos. As a result, your 3D tour has multiple section separations and brings several other problems. Let's discuss this again next week after we apply the civil survey option to your 3D tour. We'll get back to you as soon as possible.
Best Regards,
Cupix Support
Thank you for the quick response! I know you’ll get this worked out and I can’t wait to see what you come up with. You guys are great!
Hi, Claus.
Now the GPS option is working, and you can upload photos again. Let us know if you have any problems.
Best Regards,
Cupix Support