Paranormal/Spherical World Map Horizion Issues....

Support Basics & Interface
#1

I applied a 360 map to my world. Set it to “sphere” and “real”, and everything works exactly the way I want, until I notice that the horizon is cut. Is there a way to stretch the horizon below the scene as a “sphere” map so that the horizon isn’t noticeable cut off?

The Top Left image is the problem rendered. The gray is the plane, the Black is the world color, and the image is of course the sky texture. No matter how I move the plane, the sky texture is still cut off.

The Bottom image is from the UI showing how far the camera is from the plane. (side view)

The other to images are just revealing the settings used.

Does anyone know how to solve this problem? Remember it is a Spherical Map (half sphere) I just need to move the horizon, if possible.

Attachments

Problem.jpg800×600 26.6 KB

settings.jpg1024×322 22.5 KB

settings 2.jpg1024×322 23.3 KB

Camera Loc.jpg1024×532 26.2 KB

#2

Did you tried to put he UV button on?

F5 – Material buttons – map input (at the right) – and normally the ORC button is active but maybe you can change this to UV.

#3

That’s a problem with blender’s renderer. I don’t know why it works that way. There’s not a whole lot you can do about it, unfortunately, but maybe you could rig something up in the compositing nodes or convert it to an angmap using this or something like it, because blender does NOT have this problem with angular maps.

#4

@ZombieJohn: That is a nice link, but I did not see any download for the program?

You can convert to angular maps with HDRshop as well:
http://www.hdrshop.com/

#5

I was testing spherical maps and angular maps in blender just a week ago, and ran into the same problem. I think the problem is that the background is infinitely far away. You can scale your ground plane to be only 10000 blender units (if I remember correctly). Since the background is even farther away than the edge of your plane, you will get a gap between the horizon and your ground plane. Only if your camera is at ground level will the gap disappear.

I didn’t find any good solution using spherical maps on the ‘world’. You can map the same image to a semi-sphere, but at least in my case it rendered a LOT slower.

The solutions I found were:

  • Use a sky map that has a uniform color at the bottom, and set your background color to to match this. (You will have a gap, but you won’t see it)
  • Convert your spherical image to an angular map. HDRShop can do that easily, and it’s free for non-commercial work.

Does anybody know if the sphere2fish program mentioned above is commercial or free software, and where you can get it? I didn’t find any download link either…

If any developers are looking… It would be a nice feature to have spherical/latitude-longitude mapping option that covers bottom half too. These images are a lot easier to edit than angular images.