360 rendering question

Old Stuff

Just testing a workflow of creating spherical normals I came across a question about Spherical Mapper. Since the object is the lens, when doing things like distance map and object map renders, you end up with, well what should happen, just a solid color render.

Is there a way known around this in-particular?  Im drawing a blank, and it may very well be because of the nature of the workaround, but I figured to ask the community and gurus themselves if this is fixed somehow or a workaround the workaround?

Great product btw!

Horo

The renderer does not honour transparency for masks (object, distance, altitude). A transparent object is either rendered as mask (if selected) or ignored (not selected). Therefore, the spherical mapper (or any other lens or transparent surface or object) doesn't work for what you have in mind. I think the only option left to you is to render the 6 sides of a cube and assemble them to a spherical panorama, than repeat it for the masks.

 

David Brinnen

For distance map, might cheat and use a volumetric fog material.  While setting all the objects in the scene to fully black.  No light source will be required, since the fog will be self luminant.  But depending on the quality of the fog used.  That's going to drive up render times.

For object mask.  Use ambient white on your objects and a fully black unilluminated scene.

The only material you need not apply this to is the lens of course.  Otherwise that would break the mapping process.