Animated Virtual Tours

[FlytE]

Hi all, I am looking to pick some 3D brains about virtual tours. I am looking for a good bit of virtual tour software that deals with animating between hotspots. There are plenty of programs out there that do virtual tours that click between hotspots and you move fairly instantly between set panoramas but I have been unable to find one that allows you

 

1) to put a 'bridging' animation between hotspots so that you can click on them and actually physically move between them via walk-through animation

2) in conjunction with this have a hotspot 'drag' your camera target to point to the start of the bridging animation (no matter which direction you are looking at in the panorama) so that the whole movement through the space is uninterrupted.

 

Some time back I saw a company that did exactly this (ive not been able to find them again online unfortunately) but I recall they had written their own in-house software to do this. Has anyone had experience with this that could point me in the right direction?

[BVI]

Check out http://www.archiform3d.com/meander/

I think you will need to do some custom Flash work to get this right.

[erickdt]

I think Easypano might have a product that does what you're hoping to do:

 

http://www.easypano.com/index.html

 

http://www.easypano.com/panowalker.html

 

E

[Chad Warner]

A long time ago, there was software called smoothmove that would do this, but I don't think they exist anymore. More recently, after asking the same question that Andy asked, i saw a demo of an airplane cabin that was done with Flash and Papervision3d. If you go to the chaos forums and search for papervision you'll find it. It was a little chunky though.

 

The coolest thing I've seen in awhile is this stuff: http://www.immersivemedia.com/, but as far as I know, it's all video camera based. Would be great to be able to adapt it for animation.

[FlytE]

If you could shoehorn the animated movement between points of archiform meander, seemlessly in between the static panoramas of easypano.... i have the product im looking for. I know technically its possible to do in flash but I was hoping someone had already cracked it as I dont have much expertise in flash. It appears that none of the easy pano tools supports this though, the closest being tourweaver which 'fakes' an animation between points with a kind of unconvincing zoom.

 

*edit

 

A quick google search for smoothmove software ended up mirroring me to a site selling laxatives. I find this ironic considering that not finding a solution to this problem will prove to be a natural laxative in itself.

Edited June 17, 2010 by FlytE

[erickdt]

The panowalker program purports to be able to do that I just wasn't able to get their posted example to work. If the software company itself can't create a working example of what their software is supposed to do I don't hold out alot of hope for any users being able to either :-P

 

I do wonder if there was a way to do an animated panorama though. Just thinking out loud here but couldn't you render out a animation that follows a walkthrough path using a spherical camera and then import that into a panorama creation program? The user could then look all around as they "walk through" pausing the animation at the spot where they want to stand still and take a closer look. It seems like that wouldn't be super difficult to do.

 

E

[FlytE]

I could be wrong but im not sure you could do that. I imagine the animation would be an .avi or .mov, and I would hazard a guess the panorama program would only be able to import still images. I will investigate it in case I am wrong though.

[-MerlyN-]

there was a thread just last month about moving panoramas. I didnt dig into it and have no idea, what the thread title was or who posted it, but you should be able to dig it up fairly easily. I only remember it had a panorama in it made from some video cams, that were mounted on a car roof driving through downtown rome, which was pretty fun