Studio plastic was 2005. I stumbled across it when thumbing
through the training manual (I like to go back and look at the
manuals because you never know what little gems you might have
missed)
Rob,
We weren't able to find any way to control the mapping
outside of manipulating the original image. To see how it was
mapped we had to make a model of a chrome ball and render it. As I
recall, the seam of the image (where left meets right) is front and
center, which seemed like an odd choice because ti then becomes
mandatory that you make your image perfectly wrap. If the seam was
at the rear you could get away with some fast and dirty backgrounds
that don't wrap seamlessly and ususally not have that seam create
any issues in the rendering. But you really ought to check it - its
been a while since we ran the experiment, and I might be wrong
about where the seam lands
I really like the single spherical environment you put in to
replace the spherical room which has always been a mapping disaster
(though I did just get notified that it might have been fixed)
I also like that I can now render a model on top of a
photograph and get shadows cast on the 'photo' if I build the
appropriate surfaces and use make them studio plastic. That's cool.
However, why can't I do both at once? If I enable the
spherical environment I cannot render my model with the background
image shown (2004, sp3.1)
Thanks for pointing out the Studio Plastic option allows the
shadowing. Is this new for 2006? I can't seem to find any info in
the "what's new" on this.
I have another question. I agree the Spherical environment
(found in the scene editor under background) is a quick way to add
reflections but I can't find a way to directly control the image to
reflect specific areas. This was (is) possible with the spherical
room although I agree controlling the mapping of the room image(s)
can be quite a challenge. Is there a way to do this with the
spherical environment I'm missing?
We weren't able to find any way to control the mapping outside of manipulating the original image. To see how it was mapped we had to make a model of a chrome ball and render it. As I recall, the seam of the image (where left meets right) is front and center, which seemed like an odd choice because ti then becomes mandatory that you make your image perfectly wrap. If the seam was at the rear you could get away with some fast and dirty backgrounds that don't wrap seamlessly and ususally not have that seam create any issues in the rendering. But you really ought to check it - its been a while since we ran the experiment, and I might be wrong about where the seam lands