Projecting HDRI onto survey geometry

[smashley]

We have taken an hdri of a room. We surveyed that room and built it in max. We also know the position of the camera that shot the hdri. What we want to do is re-project this HDRI image onto the geometry in the scene to get better reflections and lighting. I remember hearing about a similar technique being used in Real Steel. Any ideas how to get a 360 camera mapped projection in Vray?

thanks,

-chad

[vlado]

Out of the box, you can use a UVWMap modifier in sphere mode, but you'll have to use quite high tesselation of the geometry to avoid warping of the texture.

Best regards,
Vlado

[Dariusz Makowski (Dadal)]

Its a hard one, they did Iron man 2 this way and so on. In any case, try putting a UVW at sphere mode on ur object, and then just move gizmo untill it work on model.

Its something I'm doing myself atm with my cars (simmilar) but it only works for reflection as far as I can tell, u have to use dome for diffuse and specular, not sure how vray would sample a bitmap as light source. U might also be able to use a VrayLight in geometry mode with texture in its slot but not sure...

Let me know how u tweaked ur scene !

Thanks, bye.

[RockinAkin]

I'm very interested in doing this as well - so please keep us posted with your experiments and results!

[Morbid Angel]

I haven't done this personally, but if I was to approach such method I would first take the data from each angle and project it on the geometry on per angle basis, so lets say you have 4 angles 4 camera projections provided you can match your camera lens etc in 3d to the photo you took. Then baking each of the projections to its own map and using a 3d software like mudbox which supports painting in 32 bit float (exr) to blend the 4 angles into one texture map. If your objects can be uv layed out into one uv map, or even few uv sets you should get a set of hdr maps which you can then apply to the geometry.