I you turn on show polygons (or was it triangles) You'll see the difference, It subdivides the polygons in a certain way. How this exactly effects your panorama, beats me :(

Well, it's way toooo complicated to explain in this little text area... but all you need to know is that it adjusts the spelunker valves and triple over head carbertrators and makes things look really nice... unless you get it wrong

OK - sorry... I don't have a clue about it... or no more than Zephyr does

Best to look at the examples page...
here: http://www.krpano.com/examples/

... and click on the variety of samples... and use the options plugin (look for the little down arrow in the top right of the pano) to do the following:
- click on "showpolys" to see how krpano / flash break up the images to be drawn on the screen
- click on "tessmode" to cycle through the numbers

If you want, you can add the options plugin to your own pano by following the instructions here: http://www.krpano.com/plugins/options/

... and then seeing how it affects your pano in particular.

edit: OK, I was curious and did some googling... tessmode... tessellation... and my rough interpretation is "how a bunch of flat pieces are put together to create a larger piece". Which I'll go ahead and go way beyond my actual knowledge and say this...

... You've got this great big flat image that needs to be displayed upon a "curved" surface... and since it's pretty difficult to actually project that entire image on a curved surface and turn it round and round... it has to be broken into smaller flat pieces... in this case triangles. Then each triangle can be placed and manipulated as needed to show the whole.

The different tessmodes just represent different ways of splitting the image into smaller pieces.

OK - now time to wait for Klaus to correct me.

In 3d software. Tessellation breaks up a surface to create more polygons, the result is a much more detailed and smooth result. For example a Sphere with extremely low tessellation would look like a cube, and the more tessellation is added, the rounder and smoother it looks. almost exactly how the details variable works.

Details is the amount of segments the sphere has where the panorama is on projected. A sphere with 32 segments is almost similar as a sphere with 16 segments and 1 amount of tessalation. I don't know how klaus does this, either a basic sphere, and the details adjust the amount of tessellation, or the amount of segments.

tessmode is the way how the polygons get subdivided, you can either subdivide the polygons (32 segments = 512 polygons) or the faces (each polygon has 2 faces in this example, so 1024). Then you have either Edge center based or Face Centered. So thats 2x2 possibilities, Last tessmode, would probably be no tessellation.

Because the panorama gets projected on the 3d sphere, I think tessmode adjusts how the panorama gets "relaxed" over the sphere. In other words, the way how the panorama gets distorted. In 3d it wouldn't matter because we have UVW Mapping that translate texturecoordinates with 3d model coordinates.

Hi,

thanks Zephyr, a good explanation!

the "details" parameter controls only the number of segments and
the the "tessmode" the way how the single triangles are ordered,

this was more important for Flash9 and how to get the best results on
low details settings, especially on cubical panos, for Flash 10 or higher
details setting it is not that important,

best regards,
Klaus