Binary Bonsai

Yay, progress, got my environment map setup today. Works pretty damn well if I do have to say so myself. Basically it’s a skybox (6 images) rendered out from Vue d’Sprit 4.1, with the ground being a 4000×4000 pixel satelite photo that I grapped off the TerraServer. This’ll probably be old news to some people reading this, but I’m all fuzzy inside with how simplistic this setup is.

Basically you can point your camera anywhere you want, and move it around anyway you want, and the environment map will be there to look gorgeous for you. Cool thing is that you can ‘instance’ it onto the reflective map of whichever reflective objects you might have, and you save yourself from the rendering nightmare that is raytracing.

There are a couple of problems with it of course. First of all you can’t have any interaction (at least not in this simple setup) with the ground, because there isn’t one. Secondly say you have a shot looking straight down above a plane moving forward. Unless you pan ever so slightly, the ground doesn’t actually move below you! All those problems are however not important in my dog-fight animation though, so it’s a sweet setup for me.

I leave you with two quick test renders of the environment. Nevermind the textures in this shot in general, everything is still WIP.