Panorama background wiping out part of fence

[Christina_Girerd]

I had to share a panorama with a couple clients this morning that had parts of the back fence "wiped out" by the panorama background.  Fortunately it was just a rough draft for a casual meeting.  I have never noticed this before on other panoramas.  I did a couple tests with the file where I took off the panorama backdrop and used one of Chief's standard backdrops.  Same problem.  I substituted a solid color for the backdrop, same problem.  I took out fences, trees and other items close to the camera, and still had the problem.  I ran some quick tests on a new sample plan with a big lot and a fence all around, and no problem, so it seems to be something with this particular plan.

 

I'm attaching the original panorama, part of the pano with the missing back fence circled, a screen shot of the starting camera view of the panorama so you can see the back fence, and an overview shot so you can see there is a basic fence that wraps around all the back of the big parking lot, and the test where I got rid of most items and there is still missing fence. 

 

Here is a link for one of the panorama views that has this problem.   https://accounts.chiefarchitect.com/360/138621830714104

or here  http://www.2vr.in/V-17SM

 

Any suggestions of what might be causing this issue?  Thanks.

 

Christina

[Chopsaw]

Chief has a way of not always telling us all the rules and I thought there may possibly be a limitation in distance so I set up a test terrain with a fence and ran a few tests and was able to get a failure similar to yours at a distance of over 1000' from the camera so I moved the camera further away and got a more significant failure and then changed the focal point of the camera and it worked fine but then when I changed the focal point back it still worked fine.  So no repeatable failures yet.  More testing required......  Did you try replacing the camera?

[Christina_Girerd]

Thanks for the suggestion about distance.  That seems to be the issue.  I did try replacing the camera too.  In a test file with a square terrain surrounded by a fence and the camera in the middle, I gradually increased the size of the terrain and kept the camera roughly in the middle.  I started getting gaps in the fence when the camera was just over 200' from the fence corners, and the gaps increased as I increased the distance.   When I increased the fence distance just on one side of the terrain and left the camera in the same spot, the gaps in the fence proportionally increased on that size.  I colored each chunk of fence differently so you can see where the "corners" are in this flat pano view.  When I put a tree and a building in each far corner, those didn't show either.  So it appears things over 200' from the camera don't show.

 

 

[Chopsaw]

Interesting.  It seems that distance is a factor but there is at least one other thing at play as well since I was getting results out to 1000' and sometimes beyond.  Possibly the amount of information the camera sees in each capture. My default camera settings were "Incremental Move Distance" : 12" ,  "Incremental Rotate Angle" : 1.0° , "Clip Surfaces Within" : 6" , "Remove Wall Within" : 12" ,  "Field of View" : 45.0°.

[Christina_Girerd]

The default settings for the camera I was using on that last test (which was just terrain, one rectangle slab, and 2 trees, besides the fence) were:  Incr. Move: 12", Incr Rotate: 10 degrees, Ht above floor: 60:, Field of View 55 degrees, tilt 0, clip Surfaces 24" and Remove Wall 48".     I just tried the same square field and fencing with your camera settings and didn't notice any difference - still had stuff disappear about the 200' mark.

[Chopsaw]

Tried a new 1000' terrain perimeter and could not make it fail even with the camera in a corner.  Give this a spin on your computer and see what happens.

Pano Test.plan

[Brad_M]

Chief doesn't set up some camera parameters properly when creating panorama images. If objects behind the camera are much further away than the objects in front of it, some objects may be clipped.

 

 

For now, you can work around this problem by rotating the camera to face the clipped objects before exporting as a panorama.

 

 

If this doesn't fix the problem or you run into similar issues, please contact Technical Support.

[Christina_Girerd]

Chopsaw - I took your plan and saved camera and had fence gaps, as you can see in the first image.  But then I tried Brad's suggestion and angled the camera toward one of the corners and that worked.  I tried messing around with distances of objects behind the camera and in front, and that didn't seem to change things, but facing the farthest clipped corner worked, so all good for now.  Hopefully that issue will eventually be resolved though, as when I'm showing a client a panorama, I like to control what is the first view they see. 

 

Thank you both for your help.

 

[Chopsaw]

That is interesting as I believe the saved camera was dead center and set at 90° and your results are dramatically different which could possibly suggest a hardware issue.  But where to start I have no idea.  Maybe Brad will take a look.