Spherical image with a mirror?

[jonathank]

Of course we don't have a spherical camera yet but in the mean time Im trying to figure out a workaround to acheive a 180 x 180 hemispherical image.  I've linked a dense mesh half sphere with mirror material to an orthogonal camera (see attached), its kind of working.   The problem is on the darkening periphery of the mirror.  Any ideas??
The rendered image on the right is Andrew Hazelden's Mental Ray hemispherical shader.

[jonathank]

I've been experimenting with Corona and created a fulldome camera rig (hemispherical) which isnt perfect but does work.  Its simply a very dense, mirrored, part sphere with orthagonal standard camera with 45 degrees FOV pointing at it,  a black plane with no shadows etc is linked behind it.  Its cumbersome, clunky and far from ideal but good enough to play with in the dome.  Next up trying to figure out how to render out 4K masters :)

[borisquezadaa]

A quick question... how do you do those mocap trails?
By the way, in the daylies release, there is a spherical cam now available for corona. I'm thinking in ask Keymaster for acces to daily builds just to test that.

[jonathank]

The Mocap trails are particle driven with trajectory meshing.  I saw the spherical camera functionality yesterday, looks great but its 360 rather 180. 

[romullus]

It's easy to do 180x180 from 360x180, but mirrorball method isn't bad either :]

[jonathank]

Yes but so much waste, for 4K circle masters, a equirectangular (2:1) is twice the rendering, 4K circles are bad enough

[romullus]

You don't need to render full 360x180 if you plan to use only portion of that image. There is render region function in 3ds max for that, you just need to roughly select half area in vfb and render just that part. Then ptgui, hugin or whatever you use for conversion.
 

Yes but so much waste, for 4K circle masters, a equirectangular (2:1) is twice the rendering, 4K circles are bad enough

4K isn't enough? Wow, you must rendering for fine art magazine cover ;]

[jonathank]

No, one of these :)  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dl3b5PBl87o this I believe is only 2K however

[romullus]

Nice, don't forget to share results when you'll finish!

[jonathank]

Ondra,  I would appreciate access to daily builds?