On January 3, 2011 09:49:38 am Bruno Postle wrote:
> On Sun 02-Jan-2011 at 22:15 -0500, Yuval Levy wrote:
> >> I see very little value in a wizard that asks you a number of rows
> >> and columns, this will only add complication to the GUI and won't
> >> help a significant proportion of people who do seriously large
> >> panoramas.
> >
> >and yet there is demand for that?
> 
> People ask for it.  But we had a determined attempt to design a GUI
> for it as part of James's Layout Summer of Code project and
> immediately encountered so many special cases that it would be the
> most complex interface in the whole software.  Some of the issues:

you were looking at the wrong place.  It is not in the preview/layout which 
*displays* the result.  It is in the images browser where the images are 
loaded and arranged.

> 
> Different numbers of photos in each row is normal (actually it's
> preferred for spherical panoramas).
> 
> Left to right, or right to left, or up and down sequences are all
> valid.
> 
> Zig-zagging sequences are valid and preferable for partial
> panoramas.
> 
> Middle-row first is almost always preferable to starting top-left.
> 
> All this is why the multi-row procedure exists in Hugin, in
> principle it deals with all these cases automatically without a GUI.

of course most of the time they are already arranged by the time sequence, and 
the multi-row strategy in Hugin is pretty robust.  But even that has its 
limits:

- when I trigger a single frame twice (e.g. there was a moving object in the 
first frame) and so there is an invalid image in the sequence

- when images come from multiple cameras and thus are not in a sequence.

once the sequence is defined in the images browser (and the step can be 
skipped if the image sequence is enough), distributing them regularly on the 
panosphere is a piece of cake, and it actually help optimization more than CP 
detection.  I have plenty of projects that do not optimize well when the input 
images all start from (0,0), but optimize perfectly when the images are evenly 
distributed.

can I live without the 'grid'? yes I can.  But I have never used a robotic 
pano head nor have I been through the experiences of those asking for it.  And 
since it does not cost much to have it, why not?

Yuv

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