New to Hugin, I need Workflow Help

[Andy S]

I've been creating Panos and 360 spherical's with for some time using my phone and Google Street view.  I decided to to take it up a notch and utilize my dusty DSLR to create the images instead.

Here is my gear:

• Canon T3i
• Optics: 18-55mm, 75-300mm & 50mm Macro lenses
• Nodal Ninja 4 w/ RD16 rotator
• Manfrotto 190XB Tripod
• Canon Remote Shutter controller

I decided to give Hugin a shot because I've been reading its pretty powerful and its free.

What I've done so far:

• I've taken a series of stacked pictures using the 18-55 lens indoor and outdoor.
• The pictures have 20-30% overlap
• I've imported them into the latest version Hugin (Windows Vista 64bit)
• Hugin detects the pics and adjust exposure

Here is where I'm having trouble:

I can only get Hugin to align & stitch my horizontal Pano shots.  As soon as I introduce my 45 degree spherical shots it struggles to align them or find control points.

Here is what I've tried:

1. Manually creating control points between the stacked sets
2. Stitching 1 row at a time
3. Feature matching and optimization
   
4. Reading user guide and watching online tutorials
5. Joining Google forum

Can someone point me to a good online resource or share some tips on how to make this work?  The more I look into Hugin, the more options and features I find and I have a hard time deciphering which to pick.  Also, not sure if I need to do something special in Hugin because of the lens type I'm using.  I know most use fisheye, but I don't own one yet.  I don't mind doing the extra work and learning more about this.

Thanks,

[Terry Duell]

Hello Andy,

On Mon, 01 Aug 2016 10:24:46 +1000, Andy S <aspu...@gmail.com> wrote:

[snip]

>
> Here is where I'm having trouble:
>
>
> I can only get Hugin to align & stitch my horizontal Pano shots. As soon
> as I introduce my 45 degree spherical shots it struggles to align them or
> find control points.
>

A couple of suggestions, not knowing the real nature of your images these
may or may not be of any help.
Have you looked at the cpfind options, e.g --fullscale?
Also, which version of cpfind? In File -> Preferences -> Control Point
Detectors you will have "Hugin's CPFind (Default)" but also "CPFind
(multirow/stacked)" which may be helpful to your particular case.
If none of this helps, and you don't get a good solution from others, it
may be helpful of you could provide a few of your images (just enough to
show the problem) via Dropbox or similar, so we can get a better idea of
what is going wrong.

Cheers,
--
Regards,
Terry Duell

[Markku Kolkka]

1.8.2016, 3:24, Andy S kirjoitti:
> I can only get Hugin to align & stitch my horizontal Pano shots. As soon
> as I introduce my 45 degree spherical shots it struggles to align them or
> find control points.

Is your panorama head correctly calibrated for both vertical and
horizontal rotation? See: http://www.johnhpanos.com/epcalib.htm
Note that a zoom lens must be calibrated separately for each focal
length setting you intend to use.

Is there sufficient overlap between rows? Is there enough image details
in the overlap area, not just blank sky?

[Andy S]

Images are outdoors from a wooden deck and indoors from a fairly sized well lit room.

The deck has trees and neighborhood view.  Indoors it just my home office with a vaulted ceiling.

The problem I think is there is too many options in Hugin. I tried all the different control point detectors, but it would help if I knew what their strengths and weakness where.

As a test I downloaded the free Microsoft ICE (image composite editor) and loaded the same batch of images into it.  Surprisingly it worked okay except editing options are limited.

Attached is a test I did with MS ICE.  There are some artifacts which I feel I can cure in Hugin.

[Andy S]

The pano head I feel is 90% calibrated.  I did do a quick calibration for parallax, but I don't think its perfect.

At this point I'm sticking with the kit lens (18-55mm) and shooting at 18mm with it.  I found a guide specific for that lens that seems to work.

I will take more time to dial in the nodal ninja with the lens.  when the pano head came in I rushed a bit out of excitement.

check out the sample I posted.

[Terry Duell]

Hello Andy,

On Tue, 02 Aug 2016 18:45:06 +1000, Andy S <aspu...@gmail.com> wrote:

> Images are outdoors from a wooden deck and indoors from a fairly sized
> well
> lit room.
>
> The deck has trees and neighborhood view. Indoors it just my home office
> with a vaulted ceiling.
>
> The problem I think is there is too many options in Hugin. I tried all
> the different control point detectors, but it would help if I knew what
> their
> strengths and weakness where.
>

Difficult to know why you are having problems with Hugin on this project.
We might be able to give you some pointers if we had access to the project.
Is it possible for you to make the images available via Dropbox or similar
service?
There are not many projects that can't be stitched with Hugin, if driven
properly.

[Greg 'groggy' Lehey]

[resequenced]

On Tuesday, 2 August 2016 at 1:51:45 -0700, Andy S wrote:
> On Monday, August 1, 2016 at 4:04:37 AM UTC-7, markku...@iki.fi wrote:
>>
>> 1.8.2016, 3:24, Andy S kirjoitti:
>>
>>> I can only get Hugin to align & stitch my horizontal Pano shots.
>>> As soon as I introduce my 45 degree spherical shots it struggles
>>> to align them or find control points.
>>
>> Is your panorama head correctly calibrated for both vertical and
>> horizontal rotation? See: http://www.johnhpanos.com/epcalib.htm
>> Note that a zoom lens must be calibrated separately for each focal
>> length setting you intend to use.
>>
>> Is there sufficient overlap between rows? Is there enough image details
>> in the overlap area, not just blank sky?
>

> The pano head I feel is 90% calibrated. I did do a quick
> calibration for parallax, but I don't think its perfect.
>
> At this point I'm sticking with the kit lens (18-55mm) and shooting
> at 18mm with it. I found a guide specific for that lens that seems
> to work.

That will give you the relationship between the entrance pupil (z
axis), but not the x and y axes.

> check out the sample I posted.

What I see there are:

- It looks like a 3 row pano.

- The middle row seems OK. This suggests that your z axis adjustment
is good enough.

- The black areas are where you have no coverage at all. So though
your coverage may overlap in the middle, it's not overlapping in the
corners.

- The bottom row has serious alignment issues. That suggests to me
that your lens is offset either from the x axis (axis of the main
rotator), or (more likely) from the y axis (axis of the horizontal
rotator). It seems that MCE doesn't get too worried about these
things, but the Hugin control point detectors don't want to know.
You could add control points manually, but it would be better to
address the cause. Take a look specifically at
http://www.johnhpanos.com/epcalib.htm (mentioned above) just before
section 4.

I suspect that you'll get considerably better results next time
round. If you don't, post the images (original size, with EXIF data)
somewhere and I'm sure a number of us will take a look.

Greg
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