Q: Photography guidelines for Metareal Stage

<h2 id="1generalguidelines">1. General guidelines</h2> <ol> <li>Whatever your camera setup, a tripod is highly recommended, as it allows most orientation and lens-height information to be applied to all the panoramas.</li> <li>Tripod height: Position your lens at or above the eye-line. This is particularly important if there are surfaces like tables, shelves, etc. where the detail needs to be captured. Positioning the lens too low will result in occlusions and smearing when reconstructed in 3D.</li> <li>Exposure: Make sure all your panoramas have the exact same exposure and white balance. </li> <li>For HDR bracket sets, the aperture and ISO value of all the images must be identical - only the exposure can be varied. Also, the shutter speed of each image should follow a repeating sequence. (For example: 1/25, 1/100, 1/400, 1/25, 1/100, 1/400.)</li> <li>Shoot a reference panorama that is centrally placed in each room. This will help to minimize floor-placement errors, and thus increase the accuracy of the overall reconstruction.</li> <li>Record the exact height of the nodal point of the lens (for your reference pano). Metareal Stage derives all scaling and measurements from this initial value - so it's critical that you record it accurately.</li> <li>Shoot panoramas on a grid - roughly 6m x 6m grid at around 30Mpx, using smaller grid for lower resolution cameras (we use 4m x 4m for the Ricoh Theta S). Exact precision isn't important - line-of-sight, perpendicularity, and overall coverage is what matters most.</li> </ol> ![

Question 1

How to prepare your tours for processing

Accepted Answer

Make sure your images are in the right format. Supported image formats are PNG and JPG, and they have to be 360 equirectangular panoramas (360x180 degrees) with a 2:1 aspect ratio, like this:

Even if your images are equirectangular panoramas, there are some other considerations to take into account to make a workable 3D virtual tour:

Do each of your panoramas have clear line-of-sight to at least one other panorama in the set? If not, you job submission will likely be rejected.
If possible, make sure your tour is a single building or location - multiple buildings should be submitted as separate tours. Don't worry, you can connect them together afterwards if needed.
If your tour includes exteriors, be aware that only areas with level ground can be used. Areas with uneven terrain will be extremely approximate, if they can be used at all.
Are all the doors of interior rooms open (don't worry about cupboards). If not, the production team may not be able to work out which rooms belong where, and your tour may be rejected.
Do you have images in doorways? (Are there images on the threshold between rooms?) - this complicates reconstruction in Metareal, and if there are more than 1 or 2 such images, your job submission may be rejected.
Have you included duplicate images by mistake? You will be charged per

Question 2

How to use Metareal Stage: Build Your Own vs. Built For You

Accepted Answer

There are two ways to create 3D virtual tours, floorplans, and models with Metareal Stage: Build Your Own and Built For You.

What's the difference?

When you Build Your Own

Create a new project
Upload your panoramas
Create rooms from your panos
Assemble your rooms into a tour/model/floorplan
Customize & brand your project
Publish & share

When you have your projects Built For You

Create a new project
Upload your panos
Submit your project for processing & get your fully-built project back in a few days
Customize & brand your project
Publish & share

Which route should you take?

The answer to that depends on the following:

1. Are you willing to learn the software?

Metareal Stage is a pretty simple tool, once you get the hang of it. After doing enough tours the process becomes quick and automatic. But it does have a learning curve.

If you have experience with 3D modeling and/or photogrammetry, or maybe you like tinkering with houses in the Sims, it's not going to take you long to learn everything you need to make your own projects. You would likely do better with the Build Your Own route. We have a lot of tutorials on our Youtube channel to help get you up to speed.

If you don't have that experience though, and you just want to focus on photograp

Question 3

Build your first tour

Accepted Answer

This video is Part 1 of the Metareal Basics series, where you'll learn everything you need to know to turn 360 panoramas into 3D virtual tours using Metareal Stage.

${youtube}Basics - Part 1

Additional resources:

Download panorama
How to calculate your lens height? Measure the distance between the floor and the center of your lens. If you're using a DSLR or smartphone camera, make sure your lens is at the nodal point (How to determine lens nodal point for panoramic photography)
More about the orientation line
More about level lines

Question 4

How to add virtual tours to Airbnb

Accepted Answer

Adding a virtual tour to Airbnb isn't straightforward. They don't have a field you can just fill out with a link to your tour. You can still add it through this roundabout way though:

Steps

Build & publish your tour.
(Optional) Shorten your tour URL by routing it through bitly or TinyURL
Paste your URL into your listing's description (ex. "Visit this link for virtual tour: bit.ly/virtualtour" -- Please note that Airbnb doesn't allow hyperlinks in descriptions, so bookers will have to manually type in the URL in their browser to visit it, which makes a shortened URL even more important).
(Optional) Generate a QR code from your URL and add it as one of your listing's images, so mobile users can more easily visit it.

Question 5

360 panoramas

Accepted Answer

What is a 360 panorama?

360 panoramas is short hand for 360° x 180° spherical panoramas.

Unlike typical photos, 360 panoramas let you capture the entire scene so you can look around, up, and down, making them ideal for creating immersive virtual tours.

How to generate 360 panoramas

We would recommend giving this guide to panoramic photography a read.

Supported formats

Supported image formats are PNG and JPG, and they have to be 360 equirectangular panoramas (360x180 degrees) with a 2:1 aspect ratio.

Resolutions

We support any resolutions up to 8K x 4K, they are all powers of 2 resolutions, so it's 8x4K, 4x2K, 2X1K etc… (though we don't recommend lower than 4x2K because the loss of quality is very noticeable).

For example, the resolution of Ricoh Theta V is 5376×2688, and it will be automatically resized to 8192x4096 when you upload to Metareal Stage. However, if you want to make an image sharper or crisper, you'd better edit an image manually before you upload to the server.

If you upload a panorama that's higher than 8k, it will be downgraded to 8k still.

Question 6

Photography guidelines for Metareal Stage

Accepted Answer

1. General guidelines

Whatever your camera setup, a tripod is highly recommended, as it allows most orientation and lens-height information to be applied to all the panoramas.
Tripod height: Position your lens at or above the eye-line. This is particularly important if there are surfaces like tables, shelves, etc. where the detail needs to be captured. Positioning the lens too low will result in occlusions and smearing when reconstructed in 3D.
Exposure: Make sure all your panoramas have the exact same exposure and white balance.
For HDR bracket sets, the aperture and ISO value of all the images must be identical - only the exposure can be varied. Also, the shutter speed of each image should follow a repeating sequence. (For example: 1/25, 1/100, 1/400, 1/25, 1/100, 1/400.)
Shoot a reference panorama that is centrally placed in each room. This will help to minimize floor-placement errors, and thus increase the accuracy of the overall reconstruction.
Record the exact height of the nodal point of the lens (for your reference pano). Metareal Stage derives all scaling and measurements from this initial value - so it's critical that you record it accurately.
Shoot panoramas on a grid - roughly 6m x 6m grid at around 30Mpx, using smaller grid for lower resolution cameras (we use 4m x 4m for the Ricoh Theta S). Exact precision isn't important - line-of-sight, perpendicularity, and overall coverage is what matters most.

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