Featured Site
» Posted in the Flash Kit Links section
» Title: FiveStone
» Comments: Graphic Design and Stuff. FiveStone is a full service graphic design firm that specializes in all things awesome.
BBM.net is designed to save you time and deliver the highest quality royalty-free music for your multimedia projects. Features include: over 450 Music Loop Packages from some of the best composers in the business, our music search engine to speed your selection process, alternate music versions & bonus sounds to use for rollovers or transitions, free technical support and free consulting.
With Flash's interactive features, you can have virtual tours for real, not
just some silly scrolling. For instance, I have the door to the bedroom be a
button that accesses the virtual tour of the bedroom. Same for the kitchen area.
I could have done the whole building, if I wanted.
The great thing about this tutorial is that once you get it, if you have a
panoramic camera, you can go to any and all real-estate companies and offer
your Flash virtual tour services for $. The other great thing is that, if you're
anything like me, you'll just want to download the .fla and modify it as little
as possible and get the results. The .fla is designed for that, too. Just follow
the picture taking and importing steps below.
First, about taking the pictures: you must use a tripod on a flat surface and
pay close attention to keeping the camera the same level. The camera I used,
an Olympus D-360L, enables you to take a series of pictures and line each picture
up so that they can all be assembled into a panoramic photo later. The camera
also comes with software that can stitch the photos together seamlessly. You
can do this lining up and stitching of photos together yourself without the
aid of software, but I haven't done any experiments with that.
Also, with my camera, there always seems to be some mismatching between the
last picture at 360 degrees and the first picture at 0 degrees. The seam between
the 2 pictures can be pretty apparent, and you might want to hide the seam in
an overexposed or underexposed section of the picture or whatever else you can
come up with. (I used an extreme close-up of a tree trunk in this example.
I was on such un-even ground with a weak tripod, so I had to make do). For the
apartment example, the unevenness was much less since I shot it on a hardwood
floor. I used the over-exposed doorway to hide the seam.