How to replace panoramas with third-party ones in a NavVis dataset

When an area is scanned with multiple tools, different types of panorama might be available. When projects require a specific look, you might prefer one style of panorama over another. To carry this out, a NavVis panorama would need to be exchanged for a third-party one.

Please note that exchanging panoramas is not supported by NavVis and it's done at your own risk. If problems arise, NavVis can only help by sharing best practice tips instead of dedicated troubleshooting.

The following steps will explain how to adapt and exchange panoramas in a NavVis dataset. It is currently not possible to add additional panorama locations from third-party tools.

This instruction is only applicable when using a Desktop Processing Software installation. When using NavVis IVION Processing the intermediate data required to manipulate is not accessible.

Instructions

Step 1: Adapt third-party panoramas to match NavVis format

To replace a NavVis panorama with a third-party panorama it must match specific image details. The following specs are required:

• format: jpg
• dimensions (width x height): 8192 x 4096

Please make sure that the .jpg extension is indeed written correctly and in lower case letters. Some simpler tools use different format indicators (e.g. .jpeg or .JPG), which will likely not be recognized correctly. When resizing the picture, please make sure that this step actually changes the image size in megabytes (MB). Simpler tools just adapt the dimension information without recalculating the actual pixels. A NavVis panorama with the correct dimensions in .jpg format usually has a size of 8-15 MB depending on the image content.

Step 2: Post-process the NavVis dataset and replace panoramas in datasets_proc

Run post-processing in SiteMaker or within Ubuntu as usual for the datasets_rec/<dataset_id> folder. In the qualitymap.png you can find the captured panorama locations marked with red dots. Every fifth one is marked with its number. Understand which ones you want to replace and note down the corresponding numbers down.

Now, open the folder datasets_proc/<dataset_id>/pano and change the name of the no longer needed panoramas from 00000-pano.jpg to replaced_00000-pano.jpg. This way the panoramas are not considered anymore during web-processing, but will not get lost and are still recoverable if problems occur. Finally, copy the adapted third-party panoramas into the folder and rename them with the correct name of the original NavVis panorama. The new panorama now needs to be named like 00000-pano.jpg.

Step 3: Web-process the adapted dataset

After replacing all required panoramas, delete any folders of earlier web-processings datasets_web/<dataset_id> within the folder structure. Then, web-process the data as usual in SiteMaker or via Ubuntu terminal.

After the processing is finished, you can check whether all panoramas have been processed correctly within the folder datasets_web/<dataset_id>/tiles/r0 and make sure the panorama capture location tiles, which were noted down, are present. If a panorama was not correctly added (different format or dimensions), it will be ignored during web-processing and not show up separated into tiles within this folder.

Written in February 2022