A Cupix 3D tour consists of sections, which are collections of photos and videos from the same area of the capture site that are grouped together. Creating a new 3D tour begins the process of organizing 360 photos or videos into sections.
After uploading 3D tour data, the server aligns photos and creates the 3D mesh section by section. For the most accurate placement of photos, organize sections while keeping the processing performance in mind.
Key Considerations When Organizing Sections
The Size of the Site
400 photos is the maximum number of photos per section the Cupix server can process. The server determines the relative locations of photos by comparing every photo to each other, and this process takes much longer with large photosets. This is because the number of required comparisons needed multiples with each additional photo. We recommend uploading less than 300 photos to each section if you need the tour to finish processing within a few hours.
The best practice when capturing a large site is to organize photos into sections of less than 300 photos. This covers approximately 10,000 square feet (or 1,000 square meters) of space, although this will vary based on complexity of the capture site.
Sites with Multiple Levels
The Cupix software assumes that all photos in a section are taken on the same ground surface or on any stairs directly connected to the floor. Because all 360 photos in the section are directly compared to one another to determine their relative locations, photos taken on any elevation in the space must be visible to panos taken on the ground. This means that photos taken from two different floors in the building may not be processed correctly, so the user should create separate sections for each level.
Indoor vs. outdoor
Photos taken indoors and outdoors need different environmental considerations when processed. When photos are uploaded, our software first detects whether photos in each section are taken indoors or outdoors, and after making this determination, processes them with slightly different algorithms. If there are photos that are taken both inside and outside in the same section, the resulting positions of the photos may be less accurate.
Unaligned and Disconnected Sections
Sometimes the Cupix software is unable to localize uploaded photos in a main section. As explained in "How to take 360º photos and 360 videos", there are a number of reasons our software is unable to determine the positions of some photos or part of a video clip. These non-localized photos are separated and added to sections with titles that have the suffixes NA or ANC.
- NA or Not Aligned - When a single photo is not aligned and separated as a system added section.
- ANC or Aligned but Not Connected - When a set of photos are aligned to each other but they are not connected to the main section. They separated into a system added section.
Grouping and Merging Sections
Sections can be grouped together and presented as a single site in a 3D tour. For example, photos from multiple floors of a hotel can be uploaded as several sections with each section holding images from a single floor. Once the upload is complete, each floor section can be grouped into a single 3D tour. You can also group NA or ANC sections to manually fix their positions, their scale, and orientation, and then present them together as a whole 3D tour. The Tour Editor provides powerful online editing tools for these purposes.
Group, ungroup, and more operations on sections
The left toolbar in the Overview tab provides basic group operations on sections:
- To add an empty group to organize new sections, use:
- To group sections, select multiple sections while holding down the SHIFT key and click:
To ungroup a previously grouped section, click:
- Drag and drop a section to move it around in between groups.
- Use the up and down buttons to move selected sections or groups up and down in the tree structure:
- Move a section into another 3D tour by clicking the left-arrow button:
- After sections are grouped, rename the group by clicking on:
Arrange sections in a group
You can arrange each section in a group to align their locations relative to each other; to scale them simultaneously or separately; and to rotate them to the correct angles. You can edit the photo connectivity between two sections to make a virtual walk-through with a natural transition that links the sections of the 3D tour. Uploading a floor plan to use as a reference image is the best practice when arranging sections in a group. Refer to Add a floor plan drawing in the Web Player
for additional information. If a floor plan image is not available, use the auto-generated blue sketch under the section layout as a visual aid. The Cupix software marks black lines on the sketch to represent walls or vertical planes.
To arrange the sections in a group, go to the Layout tab and choose the group name you want to edit from the Group of Section pulldown list.
If a floor plan image is available, insert it by selecting Floor Plan Image: Choose button in the Drawing view menu.
Arrange each section using the absolute scale factor. Select a section and determine the absolute scale using methods explained in Measure dimensions. After scaling, position all sections by holding SHIFT and selecting them, then dragging them to the desired location.
Arrange each section using the floor plan image. Alternatively, if a floor plan image is available in step 2, overlay a section on top of the floor plan image and position or scale them using the GUI handles explained in Compare with other 3D Tours.
After combining sections into a group, make sure to add connections between neighboring photos from different sections. The virtual walk-through enables viewers to transition between photos while maintaining the same view angle. This gives the sense of moving around in the space. When the viewer clicks in a certain direction in the 3D tour to change to a different photo, the Cupix Web Player displays the closest connected photo along the user clicking direction.
The Cupix processing software initially generates the connectivity between photos, which is displayed as orange lines when a photo is selected in the Tour Editor. Add more or remove existing connections by right-clicking a pano on the floorplan to access the Edit Connectivity menu.
Then, click on other panos to switch between the connectivity.
Note:For single-pano sections (NA section), you can complete the arrangement by entering the approximate camera height in the Arrange Section dialog box.
There are additional connection features availaable in Edit Connectivity Mode. You can automatically connect photos that are within a certain distance of your selected photo by using ‘Connect panos closer than’. Connections to this pano will automatically be made to other panos within the specified distance. The same mechanism applies disconnecting panos with the feature ‘Disconnect panos further than’.
In addition to the previously described methods for editing pano connections, right clicking anywhere on the grid will show the ‘Batch Update’ option.
The Batch Update window allows you to edit connections as a whole in a number of ways:
- ‘Disable panos Tilted Greater than’ will automatically disable all panos that are titled at a wider angle than the specified angle.
- The entered value in ‘Enable One Pano per Grid Cell’ will represent the width of a hypothetical grid. This feature will enable one pano that is closest to the center of each grid cell while disabling the remaining panos in the imaginary cell. Use this to feature if the number of panos in a section is too dense and only a limited number of panos are desired in the 3D tour.
- Delete all current connections with ‘Disconnect All’.