TUTORIAL: Taking a Virtual Tour with Pano2exe

You may also read the Spanish and French versions of this tutorial

This tutorial will allow you to reproduce completely our example "Taking a Virtual Tour with Pano2exe " and at the same time it will give you some ideas and tricks to make your own artistic creations and about how creating virtual tours using panoramas.

You may also read the online help for more information about Pano2exe.

The images of our example

Image of the beginning of the virtual excursion

The image that contains the map of the beginning of the virtual tour is of 546x320 pixels of size. In order to get some special effects in the presentation (the blinking button) the image was duplicated; therefore, the final size of the image is of 1092x320 pixels, as it shown in the following figure.

Image 1	Duplicated image 1
Both images were saved as map-sp.jpeg, a file of 1092x320 pixels size.

Panoramic images of 360°

3 panoramic images were used, they are the files:: pano01.jpg, pano02.jpg and pano03.jpg.

Logo, icons and buttons

Several images like buttons with links were used.

	Pano2exe.bmp - the yellow flat background is used as transparent color, thus it is invisible.
	icon.bmp - it is used for each one of the buttons with links to each virtual panorama.
	infoa.bmp - Along with the image infob.bmp it is used to obtain the effect similar to an animated image.
	infob.bmp
	sail.bmp - the green color is used as transparent color. It is used for the button that links two panoramas between them.

Files for downloading

You may download both the virtual tour source files (useful to see how the tutorial was done) and also an installation package that installs several linked panoramas and some related files.

The source files are compressed within a .zip file, just create a new directory and decompres there all them.

After decompressing the files you can open and analyze the project file: virtual_tour.p2e by clicking the button, or just follow the next steps to recreate the project from scratch.

Steps to recreate the virtual tour

Click , select and open the file map-sp.jpg. After that the file name will appear in the File name text field at the top of the Main tab.

Save the Project by clicking on File/Project/Save as...

On Options menu:

• Select the option Not 360° panorama.
• Select Toolbar position/Top.

On Movement menu:

• Clear (deselect) the option Start stopped.
• Select the option Don't allow manual scrolling.

In Main tab:

• Write 0 (zero) both in Margin and Initial offset text fields.
• Write the panorama title: Taking a Virtual Tour with Pano2exe in the Panorama title field, near the bottom of the tab.

In Advanced tab:

This first panorama will not be a scrolling one, because it only has the purpose of linking to the different 360° degree panoramic views of the island. To keep the island image still, the movement value, each time the image scrolls, should be exactly the same than the image width (before being duplicated), which is 546 pixels. In this way the information button will blink, each time the image scrolls.

Write 546 and 2000 in the fields marked in yellow, as the following image shows.

In the Images tab:

Click to open the image of the map in the Image Editor window, from that window you will add the images and the links to the panorama.

The trick is to add each image twice, so that each one appears in both "halves" of the image. The duplicate of each image must be placed at the same height and at 546 pixels of distance of the first image.

That means that if you place the first logo image at 200 pixels left, the duplicated image will be placed at 746 pixels (200 + 546 = 746).

To place each image on the map, click New on Images menu. The image will appear automatically selected. Write the image position in the Left and Top position fields (at the left bottom of the Image Editor window) or drag the image to the desired location.

Position each of the images (icon.bmp , Pano2exe2.bmp , infoab.bmp and infob.bmp) in the approximate positions that the figure below shows, following the same system to place them by duplicate, with a horizontal range between each pair of images, of 546 pixels.

Finally, select to each image one by one and write the links for each one of them. For the images, link them to the files pano01.pano, pano02.pano and pano03.pano. Write the links in the Link text field or click Browse to select the files.

In our example the button will show a message. This type of messages can be obtained by writing within the message, preceded by letters MSG:. Example:

MSG:Virtual Tour with Pano2exe. http://change7.com

Save the executable panorama

Click the button to save the panorama as an executable program. Keep in mind that the links to other panoramas will only work if you wrote the full path of each file in the Link field of if you place all the panoramas in the same directory.

Creating the 360º panoramas that are linked to the island map

Follow these steps for each one of the three images: and save them as pano01.pano, pano02.pano and pano03.pano (the same names used before for the links in the first panorama).

• Click Project/New on File menu.
• Click the button to open the image for that project.
• Clear (deselect) Not 360° panorama on Options menu.
• Select Toolbar position/Top, again on Options menu.
• Clear (deselect) Start stopped on Movements menu.
• Save the panorama by clicking the button. Don't save these panoramas as executable programs, but select Panoramic images in the Save as Type list on the bottom of the Save as dialog.

Adding sounds

In our tutorial we have added sound my_sound.mid to first panorama. To add sounds, simply click Open in Main tab and select the desired sound file. More information about adding sounds is available in the program or online help.

Personalized About page

The About page option only works in the Professional version. The About page usually is an HTML page but also Word, Acrobat or any other kind of file may be used. It will be opened when the panorama button (in the panorama window) is clicked.