Tutorial - Setting Tilt Constraints

This tutorial shows how to set the min/max tilt angles to restrict how far a user can move the panorama up and down.

Explanation

Sometimes you may have a movie which for one reason or another has areas near the top or bottom of the panorama which you don't want the user to see.

For example, you may simply not have photographed these parts of the panorama, or they may have large artifacts covering them, such as in the example illustrated below, where a tripod rig obscures a large part of the floor area.

Now, a meticulous way might be to remove the tripod rig using the retouching technique, but this may prove too time consuming, especially if the obscured area is large and detailed, or if a large part of the floor was not photographed in the first place.

The shorter way is simply to constrain the viewer's tilt angle to not go down that far. The artifact remains in the panorama, but the user doesn't get to see it. This tutorial illustrates that approach.

Step 1

With a cubic movie loaded into CubicConverter, tilt the movie (by dragging on it in the normal way) to "just above" the unwanted area.

Step 2

Leaving the movie as it is, click the "Min/Max" triangle over on the Movie Settings panel to reveal the minimum and maximum constraints of the pan, tilt, and zoom of the movie.

Step 3

Locate the current minimum setting for the tilt constraint which by default is "-90.0" (meaning, the user can tilt down 90 degrees from the horizontal, that is, look straight down).

Then click the "Set" button underneath it.

This sets the tilt constraint for the movie to where it was tilted to just above the tripod area. This is the furthest point down the user will be able to go.

Step 4

The movie is quickly updated to reflect the new minimum tilt setting. (On a reasonably fast machine, you probably won't even notice it happening.)

You can now test the movie by moving it up and down. You should find you can no longer tilt down far enough to see the tripod.

Step 5

We going to do the same for the top section of the movie as well.

This time, tilt the movie to just below the unwanted area, which in this example we are going to say is the part of the panorama that exists above the basketball hoop.

Step 6

Once in position, this time click the "Set" button underneath the maximum tilt box, which by default is set to "90.0" (meaning the user can look straight up).

Step 7

Again the movie is updated. When you now move around the movie, you should find the amount you can move up and down is contrained by the top of the basketball hoop, and about halfway down the concrete.

This ends the tutorial.

Watch Movie of Tutorial Being Performed  [0:52]

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