Tutorial 7: Panorama Masking

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There have been several important updates to Panorama Masking since making this video. Manual masking has been moved to Manual SkyDetect. You can view all these changes in the following release notes:

New Manual Skydetect masking interface and brushes

The toolbar of the manual skydetect masking has been improved.
2 new brush types have been added, a square and a spray.
The overall operation has been improved.

Manual SkyDetect has gained some new options

You can now track the position of your brush in the 3D world, when editing the mask a crosshair will appear in the panorama on the 3D world to indicate where your mouse is in the drawing canvas.
Added a transparency option which will allow you to see the objects that are visible in the panorama you are editing. Together with the new crosshair this should make it a lot easier to identify where you should adjust your mask.

Manual SkyDetect

We’ve added a new Polygon brush to the manual SkyDetect Mask option.
This brush lets you add or remove mask areas with greater precision, giving you finer control over complex shapes and edges.

Transcript

After calibrating your panoramas, it's time to start masking to finalize your visualizations.

There are three tools for masking. There's Skydetect, manual masking, and there's manual Skydetect. As an example, when we look at these turbines in the 3D world and move to Street View, you can see that the turbines in the background have automatically been put behind the skyline.

This automatic process is Skydetect doing its job. When we go to visualize and then panorama masking

In Skydetect mode, we can choose from different degrees of Skydetect quality. A higher quality means that the image will take longer to load than a lower quality setting, but will also result in a much more accurate result

In a wooded area. It is recommended to use a quality setting of at least high.

In this viewpoint. We can also see a turbine closer to the camera, which might need to come in front of the skyline to verify if this is the case. It's handy to reveal the satellite image in the 2D map through the map layers panel.

Here we can see that the turbine should indeed be in front of the row of trees. That's where manual Skydetect will come into play.

Selecting manual Skydetect will take you to a flattened version of the panorama.

The pencil will add to the mask, hiding more of an object. The eraser will detract from it. The brush size can be adjusted using the slider. If you want to move around in this view with the pencil or eraser selected, hold the spacebar and click and drag with your left mouse button.

The reset button allows you to go back to the starting point of this mask, which is the Skydetect Mask.

Now let's erase the part of the mask where the turbine stands on the ground. As you can see, it now appears in front of the row of trees.

Notice how using this method, the turbine in the foreground has come in front of the skyline, all the while keeping turbines that should come after the horizon or groups of trees behind it.

Next, let's discuss manual masking. When we enter this street view viewpoint, we essentially see nothing happened when Skydetect is enabled. In this case, manual masking will be the most useful masking method. Let's go to visualize panorama masking and select manual masking. The blue area is the area through which you can see the 3D objects appear. In manual masking mode, we can drag the blue points to the bottom to reveal this solar park.

You can add an extra point wherever you like by clicking and dragging anywhere on the line.

And you can remove any point by holding control and clicking on a point.

I'm going to make sure that I'm covering every area where I want the solar park to appear.

Now that we've covered the entire area, all 3D objects will appear in our photo montage.

For good measure. I'll show you how we would mask this panorama with transmission lines. There are transmission lines in front of the skyline as well as behind it. Let's select manual Skydetect. Skydetect promptly masked the towers in the back.

Now to reveal the towers in the front. Click on the eraser. If you hold control, you'll be able to draw straight vertical lines. You can also draw straight horizontal lines by holding the shift button.

We can refine what Skydetect did using the pencil.

Now the other side.

As explained in the first scenario. The key is to understand which parts of the objects come before or after certain elements in the panorama.

If you're not sure, please check the satellite map layer.

That's all for this lesson. We hope you now understand how to mask panoramas in Windplanner, and how Skydetect, manual Skydetect, and manual masking differ from each other.