Hi Jonathan.
This is a really great way of using 360 panos to present "before" and "after" scenarios. We're already using 360 panos, but haven't yet found a way to do it like you are doing it here. So would you mind elaborate a bit about your working path and what software/scripts you're using?
Thanks in advance :)
BTW - Did you use Corona Shadow-catcher here, or a matte-shadow material from an other renderer?
Yeah sure, no problem!
Assuming you've got a good 360 pic with a straight horizon down the middle of the image and some geometry that has to fit in there you can do the following:
Load the 360 pic into max's background and instance it into the material editor. There you need to flip it so it isn't mirrored anymore.
Then create a FreeCamera that we're going to eyeball in to the correct position, this will take some practice but it's a 5 minute task for me now, here are a few pointers:
First orientate the background image, so it matches the direction of the geometry, by adjusting it's horizontal offset in the texture-coordinates part of the material. Depending on the scene you might want to hide all clutter and only show the large structure you'll use for alignment.
Then what I like to do is give the camera a very large FOV, +-160, and look straight down. now you can see quite a lot of geometry and a large portion of the background image and you can now ruffly position the camera so it all lines up. After this give the camera a normal FOV and look around by rotation, not translating, and look for misalignments. Now fine tune the camera position by using the transform dialog so it's easier to only move along one axis at a time. you'll probably have to go through these steps a few times to get a proper match. Don't worry if it's a few pixels off, you can always warp things into place in PhotoShop.
Once happy with result rotate the camera to [90,0,0] so it's looking at max's horizon. Add a 'CoronaCamera' modifier to the camera and set it to a 360 spherical projection. now never touch the camera again!
Now do a test render, make sure it has a resolution with a 2:1 aspect ratio and overlay it on the 360 pic in Photoshop. You'll notice an offset due to the orientation adjustment with the texture offset, this is easily solved by moving the 360 pic to the left or right. The part that you'll loose on one side you'll have to add on the other side again to make it whole again.
For shadows I indeed use a ShadowCatcher material set to 'always transparent' mode, it will be visible in the render but with an alpha=0 so it will be invisible when compositing it. For lighting the scene it depends, in this case it was an easy outdoor scene so a CoronaSun worked great and was quite fast, for more complex (indoor) light you'd better make a HDRI 360-background pic and use that for both IBL and compositing and you'll get a very good match.
Here are a few more I did earlier, done with iray since I didn't had the luxury or Corona yet back then :)
Click helicopters to move around:
http://www.spoorzonedelft.nl/webplayer/tour.html And here is a version that has a few options visualized, these things work great at town hall meetings where these projects are explained to the people living there:
www.littleplanet.nl/clients/denhaag/duinstraat/tour.html
