Golf Sim Clubhouse Forum

Now don't anyone laugh, but I just created my first pano and got it into a new library. Both are firsts for me. My question is I'm using a 360 pano and could cut it into 2 equal parts but it didn't look very good in the game. How do you know where to set the horizontal bar so the pano height is adjusted in the game. Does it look better if you cut it into 4 or even 8 equal parts?

I just used a lot guess and check when I did mine for Peninsula State Park. I don't remember if splitting it into multiple panels helped any but I know I was a little disappointed with the resolution. I was expecting to be able to see more detail in the buildings on the opposite side of the bay and that didn't really work out because of how small I had to shrink the photo for it to be scaled properly in the game. It turned out fine though. I just get super detail oriented to the extreme while I'm doing it.

Now that I think about it, I think the cutting it into panels was just for people with lower end systems so they didn't have to load the entire pano all the time, just the panels that were in view. With today's computers that probably doesn't matter at all.

I saw your pano looking over the lake. That looked very nice. What size does the photo have to be? My original photo was 1600 x 459. The size was only 140kb which is probably why the resolution in the game didn't look so good. Can you just put a whole 360 pano in and not cut it in parts? I used the whole 1600 x 459 and flipped it to make a mirror image of the same size and connected the 2. So the higher resolution of the original pano the better chance of sharper detail in the game?

just info here DC, on my frustrating experience building panos, some time back. Eventually, I found best success by making a full pano using as high a res pics as I could find, @ 4800 x 300, then split it into two panels for use in the creator. Getting it to sit correctly could only be achieved by much trial and error - creating and recreating pano libs adjusting the height bar each time to sit roughly about a quarter way from the bottom until the pano played ok when testing, but often enough quite different from how it appeared when working the arch.
With much advice from the top designers here, as I recall there was no 'perfect' method at the time. As a tip I'd offer that you create the pano as a seperate lib, and once created satisfactorily, just leave it as a stand alone lib. Any adding of textures or objects afterwards simply resets the whole pano again to a default setting when saving or recreating. Tedious work indeed, especially if you've not kept a watchful eye on the centre bar, which will re-orientate your previous hole routing if not reset also.
Hope this helps.

Thanks for the info Pye, much appreciated.

Looking at my old files it looks like I broke it into 6 pieces of 1520x320 so 9120x320 when you piece them all together. I think I first tried half that width and tried really hard to make it work but everything was too big. I think it came down to either double the width or half the height resolution which I didn't want to do because 320 was really already smaller than I wanted.

I had taken about 5 or 6 pictures with a 10 megapixel camera and stitched them together and that just covered the side the bay was on (about a 1/3 of the pano) so I had a lot of extra resolution to play with. For the rest of the pano I stitched in shots of trees which I had to have repeat once. You don't see enough of that side of the pano to know it repeats. I remember it was very touchy to get everything in proportion and in the right position.

Thanks Brian, I'll give it a try.

H'mmm, never tried loading in just one full panel but I can't see why that wouldn't work, except that the creator asks for more than one, so ya do as yer told when unsure. Not certain I understand the value of breaking it into 6 separate pieces Brian, that just seems to present an unnecessary risk of exposing imperfect seams when loaded into the creator. If the stitching of all photos is accomplished in one large panel before splitting that into two pieces for install, then that leaves but one seam to concentrate on disguising. Duplicating your large finished pano then butting the two together inside a new panel @twice the length of the original offers the best opportunity to stitch seamlessly by cloning or some such cut'n'paste or other. Cut the original out again when satisfied, then split that into two panels for the creator.
Sounds like a long-winded cooking recipe, but that's what you get when lay-men are allowed to roam the arch kitchen unsupervised. For months on end.

Hi Pye, I think you need at least 2. I was able to make a pano and create a new library but when I tried to use that pano it didn't work ,the cursor just sat there with the busy hourglass when I tried to drag the new pano onto the arch file(course). My cake fell in the oven while baking.