I was looking into rendering my scene as a spherical image or a custom shape image, for example a capsule (cylinder with half spheres on top and bottom). I found a great post from ZEN to use the RenderMap feature.
I did all that, but the render comes out completely black.I use Rendermap to create cubemaps from a scene by baking a subdivided cube with 100% reflection.
You can use the same technique for Env Maps using a sphere.
-Get poly sphere, give it a good amount of subdivisions. 32x24. SubD level 2 or 3.
-Give it a constant material, color black, reflection white (100%)
-Give it a spherical UV projection.
-Give it a RenderMap property, Set your resolution. For a spherical environment, its best to have a 2:1 since on a sphere U is twice as long as V. So use 2048 x 1024 or something like that.
-Set type to "Surface Color & Illumination". Enable all surface properties. (this enables/disables props in scene items that will be baked, so disabling shadows means no shadows in your enviromap).
-Hit regenerate maps and it will bake your sphere map.
SuperSampling sometimes gives artifacts so what i rather do is just leave it at one, and bake a map 2x or 4x bigger than i want, and shrink it down in photoshop using filtering. (btw this is what supersampling actually does). This is sometimes faster than supersampling anyways.
You can also apply an environment node to your constant material so something renders in any empy background areas you might have. This will then bake into empty areas of the EnvMap.
Any idea how to get this working ?
Also I wanted to ask if there is a way to use this technique with the Maxwell Renderer ?
Regards,
Frank
