World for reflections

Support Basics & Interface
1

Is this a viable method for generating reflections?

What I want is a real world reflection on some glass materials I am trying to model. The camera angle (downwards) will be such that very little, if any of the surroundings will be visible in the camera view.

Rather than go through what appears to be extensive steps in creating an HDRI image, or angular map. Could the same effect be obtained by the following?

  1. take five photos of the environment. North, South, East, West, and UP

  2. Map these images to five faces of a cube. The DOWN face is going to be invisible or covered by scenery objects.

  3. Then expand the cube to enclose the scene

  4. light and render.

Question is if this is even a workable solution? also, If the surroundings could be seen, couldnt the imperfections be msed by some gaussian blurr or expansion fo the cube to the edges of the camera view range and including mist?

I havnt tried this yet, just looking to see if its even worth the time, or if someone already did this and has a tutorial. Or if someone already tried this and the results were so horrible that it should never be tried again?

2

Rather than go through what appears to be extensive steps in creating an HDRI image, or angular map. Could the same effect be obtained by the following?

Your 5 pic solution sounds as much trouble as you’re trying to avoid.

Just add a material texture, type EnvMap, enable enviroment maps in render tab in F10 and it’ll do the 6 pics thing for you. The EnvMap type texture needs you to specify an object (that’ll act as the camera for the 6 pics) so you can add an empty (or any other object) and put it anywhere in the scene.

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