Contemporary Interior Space
Statement of Intent
It is my intention to attend a local restaurant in Huddersfield and create a 360 virtual tour of the main restaurant, it will show the restaurants tables and bar area. I have asked permission from the owner and agreed to allow them to have the finished 360 virtual tour for their website.
I have made arrangements to attend the site on 3/2/13 and pre-booked out the 360 panoramic head, tripod and lighting kit from college in order to carry out this project. I have had my risk assessment approved by Katrina and I have already carried out a reky on the property, to know where the best position for the shoot would be.
3/2/13
On my arrival at the restaurant, I firstly checked out the lighting on site to determine if any extra lighting would be necessary, I decided that the lighting available in the restaurant would be suitable for the shoot. the next job was to choose where the best place to shoot from would be, taking into consideration that the space available was limited because of tables and chairs positioned close to each other.There was a more open space in the bar area, however I felt that this was not the best position because of wooden carved dividers that separated the bar area from the main restaurant.
After politely asking the owner to remove a tall advertisement which was covering the only open space between the two rooms, I had a better position for the shoot, which was in the main restaurant and yet the bar area could also be seen as the camera moved around its axis.having never done this style of shoot before I was hoping that my judgement for camera positioning was correct, I guess we will find out when I try and stitch the images together.
To my astonishment the restaurant was open to the public and there were some members of the public sat at tables eating, I asked my client if he would please make sure with everyone that it was alright for me to do the shoot, they were all co-operative. This was another reason for not using the lighting I had taken with me, it would not have been safe to use with so many members of the public and staff walking past every few minutes. ( had I needed to use the lighting, I would have re-arranged the shoot for when the restaurant was closed).
I set up the camera in my chosen space, which was also out of the way of staff and customers, and made all the relevant adjustments i.e. finding the nodal point, and no parallax before starting the shoot. I had set the 360 head at 45degree angles, which meant that I would take 8 shots not including the Zenith and Nadir, 10 in total.
As each shot was taken I checked that no people were in the shot, since the restaurant was now becoming very busy, and staff were walking in and around the camera, but they were very patient and considerate of me working.
As I came to take the last shot in the set of eight images ( 3 images for each shot, to make hdr shots) there was a chair directly to my left and very much in the shot, on the chair a man was sitting and he had hung his coat over the back of the chair, I apologised for interrupting the couple as they ate, and asked if I could possibly remove his coat while I took the shot, the couple were very obliging and allowed me to move his coat.
To shoot the zenith (ceiling) I simply turned the camera until it was facing the ceiling, and took another auto bracketed shot. For the nadir shot I hand held the camera at approximately the same height the camera had been previously on the tripod, and standing as still as I could I took the shot, as my camera was set to auto bracketing and a 2 sec delay this proved very testing, hopefully the outcome will be good enough for the 360 panoramic. Below are four of the images taken for the shoot after post processing them in Photomatix to hdr.
After this process I then uploaded the images into PTGui a software that stitches the images together as a panoramic shot, as shown here after upload, I took a screen shot to show this.
After clicking align images PTGui will prepare the images for a panorama shot, however if for some reason any of the images don't match up, you will be asked if you would like to add control points, you can do this manually simply by clicking on the same point on two different shots, so that PTGui can align the images. In this case my images all lined up perfectly because I left a 20% overlap on each shot, however the Nadir didn't match up and so I had to manually add contact points. The more contact points you add the better the match will be, but beware that it can be very confusing and easy to make mistakes placing the points. I found myself having to move points around because of the wide angle fisheye lens used, it was a little confusing as to which chair was the same one in my nadir shot.
Here is a screen shot of PTGui placing contact points manually.
After re-visiting this blog the day after it was posted, to check everything, I noticed that some of the
contact points 9.10.11.12 and 13 are on the wrong chair (right image), they should be on the chair behind the one with in the matching points on (left image).
Once you are happy with the points placed go back to " Project Assistant" and continue creating your panorama image, below is a screen shot of my panoramic image created.
Looking good so far.
Now we go to Pano2VR with our panoramic image this software enables us to create the 360 virtual tour, we simply upload the image as shown below.
In the above image I set the pan to 360 and I also changed the viewing limits for the bottom because when I viewed the final 360 there was a black circle showing on the floor where I had shot the images from, as yet I have no idea why this happened but found that by setting the viewing limits I could prevent this from being shown in the finished product without affecting the 360 at all, I also thought about adding the restaurant name on the floor, I will look into this after doing more research.
FINISHED 360
I tried everything to upload my 360 on to my Blog, with no luck, and after much deliberation I
finally I managed to upload it onto my website, it can be found on the link above.
At the bottom of the website are links to pages, the 360 can be found in the MORE section, along with contact and About me.
Although I am very pleased and excited to have completed my own 360 in a local restaurant, looking at the final product I can find a couple of faults within it. Firstly the bright blue sky at the windows caused by making hdr images, a slight double image on the gentleman sat eating, (he must have moved whilst I was shooting my auto bracketed shots for HDR). I can fix the blue by making slight adjustments on each of the images before stitching them together in PTGui, but there is nothing I can do about the man's head other than re-shoot and make sure that no-one was in the shot.
I have really enjoyed learning about 360's and I intend to experiment and improve with this technique in order to be able to offer it as a service to clients in the future. I can improve on my final 360 by adding hot spots in certain areas of the restaurant, such as the menu, or wine list. By adding a hot spot I can zoom in on a close-up shot of the menu/wine list and it will show more details i.e. prices and choices.
I would have done this for this project but due to some un-forseen circumstances I didn't have enough time to execute this. I will however do this on my next 360 project and further my progression in this specific field.
