krpano 1.20.8 - Textured 3D Models as Depthmap

krpano 1.20.8

This is mainly an improvement and bug-fix release, but also contains one bigger new feature: the possibility to use textured 3D-models instead of depthmapped-pano-images. Such textured 3D-models could be build out of several pano-images at once and so cover the whole tour. The usage cases could be better and more complete 'Dollhouse-views', nicer 3D-scene-transitions and maybe also dynamic mixture with a higher-resolution pano-image.

In this release this feature is only a first experimental test, the textured 3D-model can be loaded and used as normal pano image, same as depthmap-panos. For the following releases more APIs and features for more control and possibilities are planed. And also improvements in general usability and performance.

Here a small example with a comparison with a normal depthmapped-pano (included in the download package):


For making such textured 3D-models the open source 3D creation software Blender together with the PanoCamAdder Add-on from Michael Adam could be used. Here a tutorial.


More news in version 1.20.8:

• To be able to load such textured 3D-models, krpano supports now also the Wavefront OBJ 3D-file-format (exportable by Blender). It is similar to the STL format and very easy to load and parse, but additionally also supports texture-coordinates. The OBJ file can be used as textured 3D-model and also as 3D-object for depthmapped-pano-images. Currently only one texture file per 3D-model is supported, but with the next release also MTL files (=the material library for OBJ files) for multiple-texture-files will be supported.
• For laser-scanned depthmap-images, there is now also the possibility to use 16- or 24-bit images for more precision. As the browsers theirself are only able to load 8-bit gray-scale or 3x8-bit RGB images, the 16- or 24-bits need to be encoded into the RGB channels - details here.
• There are new settings for customizing the import/loading of the 3D-models:
  • depthmap.axis - for defining the order and directions of the 3D-axes.
  • depthmap.cull - for defining which 'side' of the 3D-model should be visible.
  • depthmap.center - for defining the center point inside the 3D-model, from where the pano-image will be projected onto the 3D-geometry.
• The loading of include xml files should be much faster now. Instead of loading them one by one, now all xml files are loaded in parallel at once. This can speed-up at the startup-time, especially when using many included xml files and when the network connection speed is not the best.
• Even when not recommend, sometimes there is the wish for zooming in VR - and therefore here now a new helper plugin (webvr_autozoom.xml) for adding zooming support for VR. Just include the file and done. Here an Example using it.
• The use of external mouses on touch devices (e.g. iPads with a mouse) to control the pano is now supported.
• Because krpano supports 'unquoted' strings and because variables can have values like 'empty string', null or undefined, it can be sometimes difficult to check if a certain variable exists or is set to a valid value. To make that easier there are now new

  isset()

  and

  isvalue()

  expressions.
• The vtourskin.xml supports now the possibility of skipping certain scenes from being listed in the thumbnails-bar and from loading when using the previous/next buttons. Therefore either set

  thumbsurl=""

  or add a

  skipthumb="true"

  setting to the element.
• Additionally there also some other smaller improvements and fixes, all details about them in the Release Notes.

Best regards,
Klaus

Quote from indexofrefraction

i'm gonna throw geometry at it

Okay, but I must admit the parsing performance is not optimized yet and mainly thought for low-poly models.
On very hi-poly models maybe also try disabling the geometry 'sub-division' by setting subdiv="10000" in the xml.

Quote from Sergey74

VTour Editor e.g.

Is in work.