Usually, on this blog we show you how WE apply our technology, how new functions are meant to be used and samples that WE have created. But isn't it also most interesting to see the raw and unedited truth of how you guys are actually using 3DVista? That's what this series is about: Letting you guys, our customer, speak.

Today, we're happy to present an authentice real-life making-of by one of our customers, TRICK DESIGN, who was kind enough to send us a report on their experience with one of the latest 3DVista additions, Animated Panoramas, and panoramas based on renders. This text has been created by TRICK-DESIGN, www.trick-design.de who has not been instructed, paid or otherwise remunerated to create this article. All opinions are authentic.

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TRICK-DESIGN is a pioneer in creating multimedia projects for online and offline media. Founded in 2000, they were able to grow their expertise in developing flash-applications significantly over the past two decades. In the last couple of years, their team has devoted more and more to the creation of virtual tours. And since 2018, they are exclusively using 3DVista for their projects.

TRICK-DESIGN's latest project is a virtual tour for a German manufacturer of infrared heaters named Welltherm. In this tour the user is invited to explore the welltherm-house consisting of 5 different rooms. In every room, the user will find infrared-heaters mounted on the wall or the ceilling. Next to the products, they'll find a presenter who, when being clicked on, "comes to life" and explains the specifications of the heater.

TRICK-DESIGN's CEO Christian Lueck was personally responsible for the conception and creation of the tour in 3DVista VT PRO: “We started in 2018 with an augmented-reality-app that we did for our client. That app had an inside view where we needed interior renderings of all virtual rooms. Our network-partners from “geschossen.com” did these renderings in Cinema4D. After finishing this job we thought it might be a good idea for our customer to re-use these renderings. That's how we got to producing an interactive tour for them. Our experiences with 3DVista in the past have been great and so we decided to use their software for this job, too. We are very happy to have the 3DVista guys in our network. The software has outstanding features, runs really stable and has remarkable update cycles that constantly bring us new features.”

And this is the final result, the virtual tour for Welltherm. The tour consist of photorealistic renders that are interconnected to allow a seamless walk-through. Various elements in the scene are clickable, allowing different types of interaction and freedom while maintaining the visual quality, the concept and continuity. TRICK-DESIGN used Animated Panoramas, a technology unique to 3DVista that allowed them to integrate a "real-life" person into a 3D render environment. However, as opposed to 3DVista's "Perfume Shop" sample, where the actor was filmed inside the actual shop, TRICK-DESIGN had to use a slightly different technique, because filming inside a fictitious render is impossible for obvious reasons.

So in order to get the actor inside the 3D rendered scene, they used traditional green screen video but added some extra work on the footage. Christian explained: “Our goal was to have a seamless integration of the presenter video-files into the computer-generated panoramas. That´s why we spent a lot of time together with our partner Michael from sichtbahr.de at video setup and production. We have noticed that it is crucial to have perfect videos with even background color when trying to implement chroma-key video as video hotspots in Animated Panoramas. Perfect lighting is key when trying to achieve this!”

Christian also explains that they used another trick that proved to get even better results: “In post-production Michael exchanged the green color with yellow which reduced unwanted border effects – because yellow matches the skin-color of our model better.

In 3DVista VT PRO, we added a manual shadow hotspot for every video file, so that the actor would later cast a shadow onto the floor, which increased the visual quality and made everything seem more life-like.

And here's one last little trick when it comes to working with renders and Animated Panoramas: The TRICK-DESIGN team measured the distance between the virtual camera and the spot where the actor was meant to be placed in the rendered scenes. They then used that same exact distance for the shooting of the real video in front of the green screen. This allowed them to get a seamless video integration into the virtual tour and prevented having the actor appear too tall or too small in the rendered 360º scene.

Should you be looking for a partner in virtual tour production, feel free to contact one of the experts involved in this project:

Concept, production and 3Dvista tour creation: trick-design.de

Green Screen Video-production and post-editing: sichtbahr.de

360-degree rendering: geschossen.com

Got a virtual tour you think we should publish? Send us an email to info@3dvista.com

3DVista is one of the few virtual tour programs that allow you to create tours that can be shown offline in non-autonomous VR devices, such as Oculus Rift, HTC Vive or Microsoft Mixed Reality. Because we get asked this a lot – here's a detail description of how to get there:

1. Create your virtual tour in 3DVista Virtual Tour PRO. Make sure to integrate a VR button (find it in the button library of the Skin tab and place it wherever you want). Here's how: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oLVJ9hH21tw
2. Publish the tour as "Standalone" format.
3. Install Chrome (or Firefox) on your computer and make it your "default browser". Should you want to use Firefox, follow the "Setup instructions" for Firefox below.
4. Execute the Standalone file and press Ctrl. + N. This will open the tour in your new default browser.
5. Click on the VR button shown inside the tour. This will open the tour in VR mode, ready for you to watch on RIFT, Vive or the other VR devices.

Note: If you don't want Chrome or Firefox to be your default browser, you can proceed almost the same way: When clicking Ctrl.+N the tour will open in what is your current default browser. Copy the URL, open Chrome or Firefox manually, copy the URL in there and ready.

Keep in mind that this is the procedure for VR devices that need to be connected to computers. If you want to show your virtual tours on autonomous VR devices (as in devices that do not need to be plugged into a computer), such as the Oculus Go or Quest, we got that covered in this tutorial:

Setup instructions for Firefox

1. Download and launch Firefox.
2. Ensure that your Oculus Home settings allow for Unknown Sources.
3. For PCs (especially laptops) using NVIDIA chipsets, there are several methods of enabling the discrete GPU. One way is from the NVIDIA Control Panel: Load 3D Settings > Manage 3D Settings> Program Settings tab, and select Mozilla Firefox (firefox.exe) (with the Firefox icon) as the program to customize, and select “High-performance NVIDIA processor” as the preferred graphics processor.
4. Restart Firefox.
5. Enjoy WebVR content!

Setup instructions for Google Chrome

Follow the same instructions as for Firefox, but changing "Mozilla Firefox (firefox.exe)" to "Google Chrome (chrome.exe)".

Want certain customers to open your tour at a certain point, room or even hotspot? No problem. 3DVista now features deep linking on media and even hotspot level. This means you can send custom links (of one and the same virtual tour) that determine where exactly the tour should start.

Different start points for different people

Imagine you want to demonstrate a kitchen detail to your contractors and your original virtual tour begins in the hall. Don't make them walk through the entire house to get to the kitchen. Instead, you can alter the tour's URL to make it start right inside the kitchen and even with a determined hotspot. Just send them that altered URL and they'll be inside the kitchen panorama immediately. Of course, they can still walk around and maneuver the tour as usual.

How does it work?

Take the original URL of the tour (something like https://storage.net-fs.com/hosting/2840800/18/index) and add the following parameters (don't repeat the "index"):

index.htm?media-index=3&trigger-overlay-name=hotspotname

whereas the first red part determines the media or panorama (in this case the third panorama in the playlist) and the second part determines the hotspot at which the tour should begin (exchange "hotspotname" with the actual name of the hotspot that you want to begin with).

Here's an example:

Inside VT PRO, check which media (5) and the hotspot name ("Organhotspot") of where you want the tour to begin.

This is the initial view of the tour when inserting index.htm?media-index=5&trigger-overlay-name=Organhotspot

So, if I want to have someone begin the tour at this exact hotspot, I'd send him the following link: https://storage.net-fs.com/hosting/2840800/18/index.htm?media-index=5&trigger-overlay-name=Organhotspot

To see the complete list of parameters that can be applied to the url of a tour visit our post: URL-Parameters to control a virtual tour