How to Create a 360° Virtual Tour and Share It with Clients (Step by Step)

You have the panoramas. Maybe they came off an Insta360 on a site visit, maybe they are panoramic exports from a Lumion or Blender camera. Right now they are sitting in a folder, and the only way a client sees them is as a flat, warped-looking image in an email — which is exactly the format that makes a 360° panorama look worse than an ordinary render.

Making a virtual tour out of them is the part most people assume is hard. It isn't. Below is the whole build, end to end, in seven steps: create the tour, add each panorama as a scene, point the client's camera where you want it, link the rooms together, label the things worth pointing out, pin everything to a floor plan, then publish and send one link. If you want the concepts first — what a scene is, what a hotspot is, how a tour differs from a video walkthrough — start with our plain-English guide to what a 360 virtual tour is and come back here to build one.

Every step below is the actual flow used to build a 360 tour in Visiomake's 360° Tour Creator, with the real button names, the real limits, and the three specific things that will block you from publishing.

What you need to make a virtual tour

One thing, really: equirectangular panoramas. That is the format the viewer expects — a single image where a full 360° horizontal sweep and 180° vertical sweep are flattened into one frame, which is why it looks stretched when you open it in an image viewer.

Getting one is usually a single export step. Ricoh Theta cameras write equirectangular JPEGs straight out of the camera; Insta360's X series saves dual-fisheye .insp files instead, so those need one pass through Insta360 Studio or the mobile app first. On the render side, 3ds Max, Lumion and Enscape all offer a panoramic or spherical camera, and Blender does too — but note that its equirectangular panoramic camera is a Cycles feature, so an EEVEE scene has to be switched over or rendered another way. Capture and export deserve an article of their own, and will get one; for now, anything that lands as an equirectangular image will work.

A few practical notes before you upload:

• One panorama per scene. A "scene" is one standing position in the space. Six panoramas, six scenes. Shoot or render from the positions a person would naturally pause at, not from every corner.
• Go higher-resolution than feels necessary. The viewer only ever shows a slice of the image at a time, so a panorama that looks sharp as a thumbnail can look soft once a client zooms into the far wall. As a rule of thumb, treat 6000×3000 as the floor and 8192×4096 as the comfortable target for interiors, where people zoom into joinery and finishes.
• Files can be up to 50 MB. That is the upload ceiling, and it is roomy enough that you should not be downsampling a good 8K panorama to fit.
• A floor plan image is optional but worth having. Any plan export works — you will use it as a minimap the client can click to jump between rooms.

You do not need to prepare the panoramas beyond that. No stitching inside the tool, no re-projection, no naming convention.

Step 1: Create the tour

Open 360° Tours in the app. Type a name into the Tour name field and hit Create. The name is mostly internal — it's how you find the tour again in the list, which shows each tour's scene count and whether it is currently published — but it does surface to the client as the viewer's title whenever a scene has no title of its own, so keep it presentable. You can use up to 120 characters, so name it something you'll recognise in six months: "Kellerman residence — ground floor, scheme B" beats "Tour 4".

That drops you into the builder, which is a single screen rather than a wizard. The bar across the top handles publishing. The rail down the left is your list of scenes. The middle is the panorama you're currently editing. The panel on the right is the inspector, where whatever you've selected gets its settings.

Step 2: Add your panoramas as scenes

In the left rail, click Add panorama and pick an image. Repeat for each position in the space. Each one becomes a scene named Scene 1, Scene 2 and so on, and you should rename them straight away — select a scene and change Scene title in the right-hand inspector. These titles are not decoration, and they are not private: the client sees the current scene's title on screen as they move through the tour. "Scene 5" floating over a presentation is its own small embarrassment. They also drive the dropdown when you're wiring rooms together in the next step, where "Scene 5" tells you nothing about which room a doorway leads to. Use the room names the client uses.

One scene needs to be the front door of the tour. Pick the one that makes the best first impression — usually the widest or most finished space, not the entrance hall — and click Set start. It gets a Start badge. This is the scene that loads when the client opens your link, and the tour will not publish without it.

There is no Save button. The builder autosaves 800 milliseconds after you stop editing. If a save ever fails you get a message saying the change will retry on your next edit — it is not silently discarded.

Step 3: Set where each scene opens

By default every scene opens facing yaw 0 — an arbitrary direction determined by how the panorama was captured, which is very often a wall. Fix it: drag inside the panorama until you're looking at what you want the client to see first, then click Set entry view.

That stores the direction the camera faces on arrival — yaw and pitch, nothing else. Zoom is not part of it: every scene opens at the viewer's default zoom, and the client can zoom in and out freely from there. Composition here means aiming, not framing. Do this for every scene. It is the single cheapest thing you can do to make a tour feel authored rather than dumped, because it means each room greets the client with the shot you would have chosen for a still render.

Step 4: Link the rooms together with gates

A gate is the hotspot a client clicks to walk into the next room. Adding one is two clicks: press Add gate, then click the spot on the panorama where it belongs. A prompt at the bottom of the viewer confirms you're in placement mode — Click on the panorama to place it. Place gates where the eye expects them: in the doorway, on the stair, at the threshold. A gate floating in the middle of a wall reads as a bug.

With the gate selected, the inspector asks for Goes to — choose the destination scene from the dropdown. This is where those room names you set in Step 2 pay off. You can also add an optional Gate label of up to 120 characters, which is worth doing when the destination isn't obvious from the doorway: "Master bedroom" on a closed door saves the client a guess.

Link in both directions. The tool does not create the return gate for you. If the living room has a gate to the kitchen, stand in the kitchen and place one back. A tour where the client walks in and can't walk out is the most common thing reviewers catch.

Step 5: Add labels for the things worth pointing out

The second hotspot type is a label, and it is the one designers under-use. Press Add label, click a spot, and the inspector gives you three fields:

• Title — required, up to 120 characters. Keep it short; this is what floats in the space.
• Description — optional, up to 1000 characters. Room for a real sentence or two, not just a name.
• Link — optional, and it must be a full valid URL.

This is where a tour stops being a nice viewing experience and starts doing work for you. Pin a label to the joinery with the finish and the supplier. Pin one to a light fitting with the product page linked, so the client specifying it can click straight through. Pin one to the wall you know they will ask about, answering the question before they ask it. Every label is a message you don't have to send later.

Anything you can't answer in advance is still a question you will get by email — which is the same dynamic behind most render revision rounds. If your presentations tend to come back with a list, it's worth reading why architectural renders keep getting rejected alongside this; a lot of those objections are answerable with a label.

Step 6: Pin the scenes to a floor plan

Open the Floor plan panel and click Add floor plan, then upload any plan image. Now select a scene in the left rail and click where it sits on the plan — the on-screen hint says exactly that: Select a scene, then click the plan to place its pin. Repeat for each scene.

This is optional, and for a two-room tour you can skip it. For anything bigger, don't. It becomes a minimap in the published viewer that clients can toggle open, and it solves the one genuine weakness of 360° tours: people lose their bearings. It also gives them a way to jump straight to a room instead of walking the whole route again. You can pull it back out later with Remove.

Step 7: Publish and share the virtual tour link

To share a virtual tour with clients you publish it once and hand over a URL — there is no export, no upload to a third-party host, and no file to email. Hit Publish in the top bar. The tour gets a share token and a URL in the form /tour/<token>; Copy link puts it on your clipboard and briefly confirms with Copied!. That virtual tour link is the entire delivery mechanism. Paste it in an email, a WhatsApp message, a proposal PDF, a QR code on a site board.

Publishing can fail, and it fails for exactly three reasons — all of them checked on the server, so you can't ship a broken tour by accident:

What clients get when you share a virtual tour link

They get a URL. That's it — no account, no signup, no app, no plugin. The published tour is a public page: they click it on a laptop, a phone or a tablet and they're inside the space. The viewer is WebGL-based, which in practice means every mainstream browser released in roughly the last decade — the relevant point being that a client who is not technical, or a committee member on a locked-down office machine, has nothing to install and nothing to be talked through.

Inside the viewer they can look around by dragging, walk between rooms through your gates, open your labels, and follow any link you attached with Open link. Three controls sit on top: Reset view puts them back to your entry view when they get turned around, Fullscreen gives the space the whole screen, and if you added a floor plan, Show map and Hide map toggle the minimap. The current scene's title sits on screen as they go, and a small Visiomake wordmark links back to visiomake.com — worth knowing if you're sending the link into a formal client presentation.

Practically, this replaces the render deck. Instead of choosing six views and hoping they cover the questions, you hand over the room and let the client find their own answers — and unlike a rendered flythrough, they control the pace and can stop and stare at the thing they care about. A tour and a portfolio video built from your renders do different jobs, and most studios end up using both: the video to win the pitch, the tour to close out the approval.

After you've shared it

You can keep editing. A published tour stays live while you change it — add a scene, move a gate, fix a typo in a label, and the autosave pushes it out. The link does not change, which means the version in the client's inbox is always the current one. That is genuinely useful when a client spots something during a call: you fix it while you're talking and ask them to refresh.

You can see whether it landed. Open Analytics from the top bar for the tour's Opens, Visitors and Scene views. These are entry counts, not dwell times — nothing measures how long anyone lingered. Even so, the per-scene breakdown is the interesting one: it tells you which rooms clients actually navigated into and which ones they never opened, which is worth knowing before the next presentation and worth raising in it. One quirk to know before you misread it: your start scene will show zero views. Arriving there counts as an Open, and Scene views only counts rooms a visitor navigated to.

You can take it back down. Unpublish kills the link — anyone who opens it afterwards gets a "Tour not found" page — and the panoramas stop being publicly served. The one exception is an image you also used in another tour that is still published; that one stays reachable, because pulling it would break the other tour. Worth knowing if you reuse panoramas across schemes for the same client.

The short version

1. Create the tour and name it something you'll recognise.
2. Add panorama for each position, rename every scene to the real room name, and Set start on your best room.
3. Aim each scene and click Set entry view.
4. Add gate in each doorway — both directions.
5. Add label on anything a client will ask about.
6. Add a floor plan and pin the scenes to it.
7. Publish, Copy link, send.

Most of the time on a first tour goes into deciding entry views rather than into the mechanics. Once you have a feel for that, the build itself is quick — the panoramas remain the slow part.