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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