St Mawes Castle Panoramas

Affleck Castle in Stacked Overlays

Whilst scouting about for some simple floor plans to experiment with in Google Earth I came across a site about Affleck Castle in Monikie, Angus. It has an interesting description of the castle complete with a set of floor plans. A little image editing was required and then it was a simple matter to stack the plans.

View in Google Earth

The effect is achieved by setting the white areas of the images to 50% transparency and leaving the black areas opaque. I tried several alternatives to this scheme - another that looks pretty good is to make the white areas completely transparent. This remains readable as GE leaves a fine white outline.

View in Google Earth

St Mawes Castle Spherical PhotoOverlay

The source pano image is 8192 x 4096 pixels, decomposed into an ImagePyramid for display in a Google Earth PhotoOverlay using the Photoshop script. That means you can zoom in and enjoy the detail of the stone (except in the overexposed areas of course).

View in Google Earth

Unfortunately the implementation of spherical viewing isn't all it should be in 4.2beta, and the pano flips upside down when you stray too far from the initial heading. There also seems to be a bug which causes GE to crash if you launch a second instance of the same PhotoOverlay whilst still in viewing mode. Hopefully these issues will be cleared up before long.