Hi, long time no PoV, but I just got to realise
one of my early ambitions and thought I'd share.

I bought a one of those mirror-ball garden ornaments
and a BIG bottle of brasso. Even after hours of polishing
it still has many imperfections but good enough for these
tests.

1. mount it on a tripod (balanced on a roll of tape)

2. take several pictures of it with a telephoto lens, mounted
on another tripod, keeping the aperture fixed and varying
the shutter speed.

3. Merge the (tiff) images to a HDRI using Photomatix Pro
(free trial version, Mac or PC).

4. Still in Photomatix, crop the mirrorball hdri to a square
image and choose Utilities>Unwrap Mirrorball.

5. Save the result as a whatever.hdr

6. Import it into MegaPov with:
sphere {
    0, 0.5
    texture {
        pigment {
            image_map {
                hdr "whatever.hdr"
                once
                interpolate 4
                map_type 1
            }
        }
        finish {
            ambient 1 // or 2, 3 ...
            diffuse 0
        }
    }
    hollow on
    no_shadow
    scale 10000
}

See 2 attached images for same scene lit with 2 different
image maps - daylight and night time (tungsten bulbs)

Hope you like.

-- 
Bill Hails
http://thyme.homelinux.net/

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Attachments:
Download 'office4b.jpg' (53 KB) Download 'office5b.jpg' (34 KB)

Preview of image 'office4b.jpg'

Preview of image 'office5b.jpg'

Cool.  If your probes aren't too big would you be able to post them 
somewhere?
2 of my homemade ones are here:
http://www.deviantart.com/view/28753146/
http://www.deviantart.com/view/27943328/

-tgq

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Trevor G Quayle wrote:

> Cool.  If your probes aren't too big would you be able to post them
> somewhere?

They're a bit big to be honest, about 25meg apiece, and somewhat
embarrasing (I think you cans see yesterdays dirty underwear in
one of them :-) but I'll be persevering and looking for more
interesting locations in the near future: sunsets and the like.
I'll post those as and when.

> 2 of my homemade ones are here:
> http://www.deviantart.com/view/28753146/
> http://www.deviantart.com/view/27943328/

neat.

> -tgq

-- 
Bill Hails
http://thyme.homelinux.net/

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Bill Hails <bil### [at] europeyahoo-inccom> wrote:
>
> They're a bit big to be honest, about 25meg apiece, and somewhat
> embarrasing (I think you cans see yesterdays dirty underwear in
> one of them :-) but I'll be persevering and looking for more
> interesting locations in the near future: sunsets and the like.
> I'll post those as and when.
>

I've just been playing with HDR a lot recently and have been trying to get
as many different ones as I can.  Let me know if you ever do make any
available.

If you are just using a trial version of Photomatix, you may want to try HDR
Shop (http://www.hdrshop.com/) which is free.  It's the one I've been using
and it has some great tutorials on how to use, including how to make probes
without the camera being visible.

-tgq

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Trevor G Quayle wrote:

> Bill Hails <bil### [at] europeyahoo-inccom> wrote:
>>
>> They're a bit big to be honest, about 25meg apiece, and somewhat
>> embarrasing (I think you cans see yesterdays dirty underwear in
>> one of them :-) but I'll be persevering and looking for more
>> interesting locations in the near future: sunsets and the like.
>> I'll post those as and when.
>>
> 
> I've just been playing with HDR a lot recently and have been trying to get
> as many different ones as I can.  Let me know if you ever do make any
> available.

Well since you asked nicely, here's the daylight one:
http://thyme.homelinux.net/Office6.hdr
sorry about the mess :-)
Be aware it's the wrong end of an ADSL link, I *seriously* need to
sort out some decent web hosting.

> If you are just using a trial version of Photomatix, you may want to try
> HDR
> Shop (http://www.hdrshop.com/) which is free.  It's the one I've been
> using and it has some great tutorials on how to use, including how to make
> probes without the camera being visible.
> 
> -tgq

Yeah, I know of hdrshop but there wasn't a Mac version last time I looked.

BTW I just got the Reinhard/Ward/Pattanaik/Debovec book:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0125852630/qid=1144936653/026-5462659-1654009exec/obidos/ASIN/0125852630/qid=1144936653/026-5462659-1654009
which features a dvdrom with lots of hdri software on it,
but the maths is scary and I haven't yet found out what most of the
code in there does.

-- 
Bill Hails
http://thyme.homelinux.net/

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> Well since you asked nicely, here's the daylight one:
> http://thyme.homelinux.net/Office6.hdr
> sorry about the mess :-)
> Be aware it's the wrong end of an ADSL link, I *seriously* need to
> sort out some decent web hosting.
>
> Yeah, I know of hdrshop but there wasn't a Mac version last time I looked.
>
> BTW I just got the Reinhard/Ward/Pattanaik/Debovec book:
>
http://www.amazon.co.uk/http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0125852630/qid=1144936653/026-5462659-1654009exec/ob
idos/ASIN/0125852630/qid=1144936653/026-5462659-1654009
> which features a dvdrom with lots of hdri software on it,
> but the maths is scary and I haven't yet found out what most of the
> code in there does.
>

Thanks :D

Didn't realize you were on mac, but the tutprials are still good for the
general concept of removing the camera, not sure how well it translates to
Photomatix though (i.e., what features it has for arbitrary transforms and
image addition)

-tgq

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