Moderator Note from September 9, 2021: Please scroll down and read the comments for real-world experiences from community members.
Hi! I decided to continue my search for what program is best for my needs to share my 360° media. Today I’m focusing on the 3DVista application!
I used the Ricoh Theta SC Hatsune Miku to capture my photos/videos as usual. I am interested in trying out different 360° programs in order to find what fits my needs best; something quick, efficient, and optimized for social media.
Initial Thoughts
The 3DVista website is impressive in that it utilizes some great 360 images right off the bat! The team has put together a few pieces of software that are available with your free trial. For this review, I focused on specifically the 3DVista Virtual Tour creator, as I did not need to stitch together images into panoramas.
This tool is one of the more expensive options I’ve looked at! The application itself is 499 Euros, not including access to their servers or the photo stitcher.
The download for the 3DVista trial was a little long for me. Longer than any of the other downloads I’ve done for 360 so far. One cool thing immediately off the bat is that the trial for 3DVista is much longer than normal 360 software – it’s a month long! I was excited about that. Upon opening the application, you are given some preset tour skins after beginning your tour creation. I decided to make a “mini” tour, which only had one style and type available.
Once you are in the application, you are able to batch upload images to an album, add panoramas, or use the 3dVista Stitcher to create panoramas out of images. I went with the batch upload, which was fairly quick. I then realized that wasn’t the right move and started over doing panorama uploads, which allow for multiple types of panorama (and take multiple files at once). I like that you are able to control the panning speed and smoothness, which seems to a key feature in these higher end applications. There was a lot of customization for the playback bar as wekk, which I liked.
The 3DVista tool is fairly straightforward, but offers a lot of options that help to make the software seem personalizable and easy to use.
One thing that was kind of annoying is how long the upload time to a preview takes. To view your preview, you must use a piece of downloadable software from 3DVista (3DVista Tour Viewer, see a theme?) as well, meaning you have a lot of things open at once. I put some music over my tour and created a fun color scheme that is more reminiscent of me and less reminiscent of “Free Trial Color Options” which is awesome!
Because of the way 3DVista is setup, I can’t host the tour I created anywhere, so I’ve converted it into a 360 video (which is taking even longer to stitch together than the original download) and̶w̶i̶l̶l̶ ̶a̶t̶t̶a̶c̶h̶ ̶i̶t̶ ̶h̶e̶r̶e̶ ̶w̶h̶e̶n̶ ̶i̶t̶’̶s̶ ̶d̶o̶n̶e̶ the 3DVista program created a minute long silent slideshow of my 360 images so I will not be attaching it because it’s terrible. In summary, here are my pros and cons for the 3DVista Virtual Tour creator (process, really, since it’s not just one application):
Pros | Cons |
---|---|
Quick uploads | Offensive watermarking in free trial version |
Highly customizable | Can’t upload to their server unless you pay, can’t upload to Google Street View unless you pay |
Longer free trial than most 360 software (1 month long) | Geared towards individuals who are creating virtual tours for profit, not suitable for hobbyists |
Very much a “drag and drop” process, does a lot of work for you |
Concluding Thoughts
I liked 3DVista basically up until the end. This is mostly because things seemed really great until I was unable to publish the tour I created in a way that I saw fit. I wasn’t happy with the way my tour turned out because of this, and wouldn’t be able to suggest this software to hobbyists looking for 360 software. It seems like 3DVista once paid for would be a shoe in, though at a high price point.
Until next time!