What if you could capture a whole, breathtaking Skyrim scenery without neglecting any detail because of the limited framing? In this guide I will show you how to take panoramic screenshots in 3 steps.


Did you ever stop walking to admire your surroundings; the trees, the sun, the river, the lights?
I personally love taking my time to memorize what I have around. While what I see is digitally created and not real at all I realize how many hours, days, months or even years of work someone spent to create that building we don’t pay attention to, that area we visit for just five minutes, those things we leave behind because we barely notice them.

• tm (Toggle Menus) Disables all GUI elements, including menus, the compass, subtitles and messages.
  
  
• tfc (Toggle Free Camera) Let you basically move the camera anywhere. Adding a <1> will pause the game. Type tfc again to disable it.
  
  
• sucsm <#> (Set UFO Camera Speed Multiplier) Set the speed of the free-flying camera (tfc). The default is 1. Setting it to 2, for example, would double the speed, and to 0.5 would half the speed. In our case we will be using the default value (1) wich is the one I personally use.
  
  
• fov <#> (Field of View) Adjust field of view. The default is 75, and the maximum value appears to be 160. I recommend a value beetween 100 and 130, it may depend on what scenary you are tryring to shot.
  
  
• set gamehour to <hour> changes the time, <hour> can be set beetween 0 and 23. For example set gamehour to 10 will set the time to 10am, set gamehour to 18 will set time to 6pm etc.
  
  
• fw <wheather id> (Force Weather) Will change the current weather to the one specified. Check Here[elderscrolls.wikia.com] for the list of weather id.

In order to make a clean panoramic screenshot you have to be sure the HUD and your player are completely hidden (tm). Now use the toggle free camera (tfc) to positionate the camera in the wanted spot. You can set the speed of the camera using (sucsm <value>). Also, the whole scene should be paused (tfc 1).

When you're all set, positionate the camera on the left and rotated it to the right saving a picture for every single frame Just like this.[imgur.com] Be sure to keep your camera perfectly aligned or else the final image will not look right. Now that you have your images ready you can proceed to the next step.

There are actually few different programs that you can use for this, although I’m sure you may find other specific applications like PTGui (already tried, not user friendly if you do not know the basics imo), Adobe Photoshop etc. If you are not user-friendly with Photoshop or PTGui, you should use this user-friendly software called Image Composite Editor[research.microsoft.com] (wich is completely free).

The program includes three different buttons to work on a Panorama. For what you need to do with the screenshots you made New Panorama from Images is the option you have to select. A new window will appear, search for your pictures and load them all at once into the Editor.


The Structured panorama allows you to play around with the composition manually, but I suggest you to just keep it as it is, set on Simple. Once your screenshots are all imported click on the Stitch tab and wait until the merging process is finished.


This is how your final image will look. By default it’s set on Cylindrical, but you can try the other options to see what kind of results you can get from the stitched composition. For simple Panorama shots you can leave it on Cylindrical and proceed with the Crop tab.


As you can see the image has transparent borders and the two ends are a bit deformed. In order to fix this, simply click on the Auto complete button on the right and voilà! The empty edges will be filled in a more or less accurate way.


If you get some weird patches here and there in the filled areas you can use the crop tool to get rid of those. If you’re happy with your composition click on Export and save your final picture.