problem of "depthmap.background" setting to solve model defect

An online example would be nice to see what you are experiencing.

Any reason why you dont texture the .obj with actual materials?
I believe depthmap.background is mostly used to fake 3D transitions between 2 panos and can be used to texture 3D models but it is not the main purpose.

As an alternative, you could use 2 scenes: first scene where you walk around the model with all geometry and textures, and a second scene when you swith to dollhouse view with the modified model/textures

Digging up this old thread, I ran into the same problem.

When setting "depthmap.background=pano", the depthmap is clipped at 1000 pixels for the transition.

Here is a screenshot of the depthmap with background="none":

Here is a screenshot of the deptmap with background="pano"

As you can see, in the last image, the depthmap is clipped, probably by the default 1000 depth of the rendered cube/pano. And this in turn causes indeed an unnatural effect when using 3D transitions as only part of the 3D model is used for the transition. I solved it by adjusting the scale property of the <depthmap> tag to make the entire depthmap smaller than 1000 so it always fits the panorama. (scale=1 instead of scale=100).

I saw others "solving" it by creating a sphere around the 3D model, so there is always geometry to display and then you can use the depthmap.background="none" with depthmap.scale=100. But this to me is also a workaround.

Is there a way to increase the depth of the rendered cube/pano? This would make it a lot easier and we can use proper values for the tx/ty/tz of hotspots (instead of converting them to a lower scale).