flat panorama for reflections - how?

[simonm]

Hi guys

 

I posted this in here as its an arch viz thing andim using vray. Anyway, when im doing photomontages, i generally use HDRI's (Peter Guthrie Pack 5) and the ground plane is black in these HDRis. So therefore when doing a photomontage, I either use a vrayplane or leave it out. Leaving it out gives me a black plane from the HDRI and vray plane gives me the vray plane material.

 

Anyway, my point is that the glass window reflections give either the black (hdri) or vrayplane reflections so Im wondering how people tackle this in terms of obtaining more realism?

 

Ideally I would like to know how one would do flat panoramas so I could use them as backplates behind the camera (or not visible to camera) in order to reflect off the glass if that makes sense. Such panoramas are:

http://i.stack.imgur.com/rTL6n.jpg

 

That is poor job but I want to know how one would do so (but much neater of course)

 

Any ideas?

[jasonstewart]

Can you post on of your renderings that shows what you don't like? Im having a hard time understanding exactly what the issue is.

 

I have made a "flat panorama" before but it is virtually impossible to make nice unfortunately. After doing it I realized how brilliant Google's Street View really is, of course you can only view it in select places...My guess is that is where they took the frame from. You can use a panorama though, no need for a "flat panorama" just make the geometry curved.

 

Here is an example of using a panorama that the artist took from the location and then put it on a cylinder around the model: http://www.ronenbekerman.com/making-of-dune-house/

[Tommy L]

A tripod will go a long way....

I know what you mean about the black line, its the bottom hemisphere which is not present in many HDRI's. There's a couple of cheats, you can clip your HDRI to lower the horizon, or mirror it to make a full 360 sky, or sherically map a gradient into the lower half of your environment or build a horizon like your clip art above (which will be LDR).

I just had a photographer take a bunch of shots to get me a panoramic of an interior VR. It had to be super neat and tidy as I was keeping the curtain walling all the way around in the final image (LDR) and also building an HDRI for the lighting/reflections.

The resulting panoramic was 18k pixels across, used ~27 images. Multiply that by 8 brackets for the HDRI. It lined up perfectly in Kolor Autopan Pro using the automatic stitching tools, no manual fiddling at all. Hats off to the photographer for good leveling.

Project is still under wraps but I might do a tutorial on it when its published.

[simonm]

Jason and Tom - thanks for your replies.

 

Jason, thats a great suggestion and a great tutorial-. I did read that some time ago but had forgotten about it. Ill use something similiar as a backplate. Ill go to the front of my house and take a panorama there, its purely for urban street reflections.... thanks.

 

Tom - that sounds awesome, thanks for the tips - would love to see the tutorial youre referring to - i love my tuts and that sounds like a cracker