I'm playing around with panorama software and thought it would be interesting to try and stitch together Shenmue panoramas. It turns out that it is much harder to accomplish than in most 3D games, where you can control the camera steadily. Nevertheless, here's one test that didn't turn out as disastrous as the previous ones:
Hazuki Residence's front yard
The most useful camera mode is zoom mode but it has a few issues of it's own. For one it zooms in and locks onto objects of interest (none on this angle fortunately). The other issue with this camera mode is when you point the camera towards the ground it starts zooming in much further than on other angles.
The normal camera mode is worse though. With normal camera, even though you can make Ryo invisible and make it look as an FPS view, the camera rotation is limited to something like 180º and besides the camera zooms in when reaching it's limits. Rotating the character itself is also not good enough for two reasons, one is that it's limited to the X axis, the other is that the player moves a bit around it's own X axis which changes the angle enough to screw the final result.
If anyone knows any trick/code to rotate the camera axis steadily, that would help make awesome panoramas.