- Cubical- Ideal to work with panoramas inside 3D applications like 3DS Max, Lightwave, Maya, or Cinema4D. To create an environment for these applications, create a cube in your 3D scene, make it as large as the software will allow you, and apply each of the six textures to the sides. You may need to reverse the face normals on your cube to be able to see it. You may also want to make your textures 100% self-illuminating for correct rendering and keep it from being illuminated by lights in your scene. Keep in mind, that the camera should never translate over large distances in relation to the cube (ideally it would not translate at all) or the panorama will exhibit perspective distortion, which is inconsistent with foreground elements in the 3D scene. Cubic is also the right format to use for the importing of environments into game engines like the Quake engine.
- Spherical - This is a good format to use when you want to use a panorama in a 3D application, but want to save on texture memory, or when you need a flat rectangular image of a 360 x 360 degree view of your panorama. It is also great for reflection maps and global illumination maps.
- Cylindrical - This is the appropriate format to use when you want a single flat rectangular bitmap image showing a complete horizontal 360 degree view of your cylindrical panorama (a panorama that is not completed all the way up and down). This kind of images can be printed.
- Snapshot- This projection is great to get a single very high-resolution image out of multiple lower resolution stitched images, or to get an extremely wide angle shot from several tighter shots. This is also a useful way to take images of very large objects for use in ImageModeler.
- QuickTime VR- QuickTime VR is the perfect format to use when you want your panorama to be viewable on the web, on a DVD or on a CD.
- VRML. You would use this format to meet specific interactive 3D requirements for VRML geometry.
- PURE Player – Like QTVR, can be published on the Internet, you can read it with a Java viewer or the last FLASH versions
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