Create your own 360° panorama environment maps
CG Geek shows us how to create our own full spherical environment maps – on the cheap!
In this DIY tutorial, we create a 360° Spherical Panoramas for Environment Lighting on your 3D and CG scenes!What you Need:
- Camera – with a few manual options.
- Photo editing software – I used Photoshop Elements. but there’s other free software out there like Gimp.
- Tripod.
And you’re ready to go!
Thanks! Good instructions.
Fantastic! I know what I’ll be doing next weekend…
cg geek, your work is always awesome, thanks for sharing!
just a note though, in the video itself, i think you refer to this technique as HDR several times, which is a bit of a misnomer, since you are capturing jpg images, which are in fact low dynamic range, and don’t contain enough data to recreate the scene’s lighting, such as shadows from the sun (but can still be very useful for reflections or a general ambient colour, as you demonstrated!)
HDR would require capturing multiple exposures of every section you are stitching together and merging that into a file format that contains the full breadth of illumination information.
If you are using windows you can stich the images simply with the free program Microsoft ICE. It merges the Image so perfect, that you cant find the edges and you can handle an unlimited filesize!
But for this Technique you need to take your photos from the exact same point while shooting.
http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/redmond/groups/ivm/ice/
WinnerTakeSteve: I agree. It’s not just a bit of a misnomer, it’s wholesale misrepresentation (although kudos to BlenderNation for only calling it what it is: 360-panorama-environment-map). Does CG-Geek know this? If you just google image search for HDRI you basically get .jpg panoramas because that is all the image search is able to find (as far as I know…) However, this tutorial could be greatly enhanced just by taking two extra EV light steps for every image he takes and making a true HDR 360.
I know I was referring to it as a HDR, and I was doing that for the same reason you stated, when you do a google search for HDRI mostly all you get are 360 panorama environment maps. The reason I didn’t do a true .hdr file is because to my knowledge this requires more expensive software, and this is something I wanted to do on the cheap.
What about luminance HDR? It’s a free opensource HDR imaging package.
I think this the quickest way to make 360 photo – https://www.google.com/maps/about/contribute/photosphere/
Kudos to Steve for showing this! I want to share another great software that can also do this very well. Do a search for “Hugin”. Its interface is very similar to the commercial software PtGui which I think is probably one of the best Pano software out there.