[KimDaBa] Hugin rocks... after you figure out its quirks/bugs

[Shawn Willden]

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On Friday 22 October 2004 02:32 am, jedd wrote:
>  Hugin is, as stated, a front-end to the panotools .. which apparently are
>  very good, just suffer a woeful native interface.  Hugin, judging by the
>  tutorial for using it, is a superb and sexy and wonderful interface ..
>  but even after you get thru the thrill of compiling the sucker, it will
>  happily let you spend a half hour lining up all your common points to
>  connect the photos together, and then produce a zero-byte output.

I've stitched dozens of nice panoramas (and a few even more-complex images) 
with hugin/panotools and never had a zero-byte output, so this statement 
puzzles me.  I've had plenty of problems, but never that one.

Here is what I've learned about using Hugin successfully:

1.  Experiment a bit with the point placement to learn how it works.  After 
you understand how much of the work hugin will do for you, it rarely takes 
more than a minute or so per pair of source images.

2.  Save frequently.  Very frequently.  The constant crashes are Hugin's worst 
problem, IMO.

3.  Use the preview window.  Lots.  I check it after setting up the points for 
each pair of images, just to see that things are shaping up right.

4.  Add horizontal and vertical guides, as necessary, but only as necessary.

5.  Before stitching, click the "calculate field of view" button and the 
"calculate pixel dimensions" button, and look at the resulting size to make 
sure it makes sense.  If it's too large or too small, look at the preview to 
figure out why.

It's quirky, but panotools is *extremely* powerful and flexible and produces 
really beautiful composites from images in virtually any orientation.  I have 
the Windows-based stitcher that came with my camera installed on a VMWare VM, 
and it's really trivial to use, but I never use it because hugin/panotools 
does a much, much better job.

Oh, and I've never had any trouble building it... configure, make, make 
install works for me.  After apt-getting panorama-tools, libwxgtk2.4-dev and 
libwxgtk2.4-contrib-dev, of course.  What causes the hangups for others?

 Shawn.
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