What if you could capture a whole, breathtaking Witcher 3 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.

First of all, you will need to download the Debug Console Enabler[www.nexusmods.com] on the Nexus of The Witcher 3 to be able to use the console. To install the mod, please follow the step provided on the mod page. Also, I strongly suggest you to use a controller + a keyboard to be able to get an awesome final result. (I will explain why later)

• testpause - Will let you pause the game to take the perfect shot.
  
  
• testunpause - Will basically unpause the game.
  
• Press F1 to use the free camera.
  
  
• Press HOME to enable/disable the HUD completely.
  
  
• While in free camera mode, press the UP and DOWN button on the cross navigation key on the controller to set the FOV. (I didn't find how to set the FOV with a keyboard, If someone know, let me know and I will edit it)
  
  
• makeitrain - Will summons a storm.
  
  
• stoprain - Will obviously stops the rain.
  
  
• changeweather(name) - change the weather to name.(Weather Codes)[pastebin.com]
  
  
• settime(time) - sets time to time.

for a full list of commands, I suggest you to read This Guide

In order to make a clean panoramic screenshot you have to be sure the HUD and your player are completely hidden (HOME). Now use the free camera (F1) to positionate the camera in the wanted spot. (I recommend you using a controller for this part) You can speed up the camera by pressing LT. Also, the whole scene should be paused (testpause).

When you're all set, positionate the camera on the left and rotated it to the right saving a picture for every single frame. 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[www.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.

Thank you for taking your time to read this guide, let me know in the comments if you would like to see more guides for panoramic screenshots for other games !

Don't forget !