Re: [Pipmak-Users] Cube panorama picture quality

[Christian W. <cwa...@gm...>]

<gua...@vi...> wrote:

> I was wondering if the cube panoramas always looks like the images 
> have been blown up 50%?

The size of the image pixels on your screen depends on three factors:

o resolution of the face images (512x512 in your case),
o field of view,
o window size.

So, what you can do to make the image sharper (the pixels smaller), is:

o Make the window smaller - probably not an option

o Increase the field of view (zoom out) by pressing X or by calling 
pipmak.setverticalfov() in Lua - probably not an option either since a 
bigger field of view means more perspective distortion (in other words, 
you have to be nearer to the screen for it to look right).

o Increase the face image resolution. You can use 1024x1024 or even 
2048x2048 (if your graphics card supports it), intermediate sizes are 
not possible at the moment. The problems here are that loading bigger 
images takes longer, and that your graphics card might run out of 
texture memory (6*512*512*3 bytes = 4.5 MB, 6*1024*1024*3 bytes = 18 
MB, 6*2048*2048*3 bytes = 72 MB). You can also use different 
resolutions for different faces, e.g. 512 for the top and bottom and 
1024 for the sides.

I'm sorry this stuff isn't in the documentation yet. If you are 
comfortable with CVS and TeX, you can get a slightly more comprehensive 
version of the documentation than the one included with 0.2.0 from CVS. 
I don't have time to make a new release at the moment.

Hope that helps - I know the problem, but there is no real solution. 
You have to find compromises. Full panoramas just do take a lot of 
space.

  -Christian