Thanks heaps Michael-
I think the main reason is like you say at first- the normals across a flat
surface are all pointing in one direction.
It's ok, it was a great educational experiment, and I'm sure your gizmo will
come in handy sooner or later.

Cheers,
Jordan

On Wed, Sep 21, 2011 at 6:00 PM, Michael Garrett <[email protected]>wrote:

> Hi Jordan,
>
> This is the classic dilemma with spherical reflections on flat surfaces,
> and it's where mirror reflections can work better.  The general problem is
> that the normal across the flat surface is pointing in one direction which
> means too little variation when the UV coordinates are created.  It will
> work "correctly" but it can be a really zoomed in portion of the environment
> map that is too soft, or it may look like a solid colour.  One old method to
> hack this in 3D is to create a slightly concave or convex surface for the
> reflection pass.
>
> I'm not sure where the lack of detail is stemming from in your case, but
> yes the camera output set to "spherical" will render the lat-long that the
> gizmo expects.  You could try filtering/warping the input image a bit in
> order to create some variation.  A "pinch" distort (inverse barrel
> distortion) may help to decrease the field of view prior to the texture
> lookup to pull in more detail.
>
> Another issue may be that your point data is in 16 bit half float which may
> lack the precision needed to generate the reflection vector in some
> cases, which would return a blocky looking reflection.  You want full 32 bit
> float.
>
> HTH
> Michael
>
>
> On 20 September 2011 19:31, Jordan Olson <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>> Hey Michael,
>>
>> Thanks heaps, I did some testing with it, and although it seemed to work,
>> I had difficulty getting detailed reflections to show up on flat surfaces.
>> Does a camera set to "spherical" shape render the appropriate lat-long image
>> that the gizmo is expecting?
>>
>> Will do some more testing in a different scenario. Thanks heaps for the
>> time you put into the gizmo, the math behind it is just beyond me.
>> Cheers,
>> Jordan
>>
>>
>> On Mon, Sep 19, 2011 at 6:36 PM, Michael Garrett 
>> <[email protected]>wrote:
>>
>>> I wrote this gizmo for doing environment reflections and it does take
>>> into account camera movement.  Basically it does classic cg environment
>>> mapping as you would have seen in a pre-raytracing Renderman shader, or the
>>> Nuke Environment shader.
>>>
>>> To use it you need the Nuke camera, a world point AOV and world normals
>>> AOV for your input, and the environment image you would generally feed it
>>> would be an unwrapped spherical environment.
>>>
>>> There is a bit of optional exr metadata stuff that bloats this gizmo out
>>> a bit, you could always remove that if you want (I need to update it some
>>> time).
>>>
>>> Michael
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> On 18 September 2011 21:00, Jordan Olson <[email protected]> wrote:
>>>
>>>> Good question,
>>>>
>>>> Say we have an environmental map in the form of an unwrapped image, (or
>>>> a nuke 3D camera set to Sphere rather then Perspective)
>>>> - and we want to apply that to the render which has a normals World
>>>> pass. Though now that I think of it, it would have to take into account
>>>> camera movement to draw new motion vectors...
>>>> so- to answer your question, probably to simulate reflections?
>>>>
>>>> Ok, upon further research, I'm going to look into this method here.
>>>> http://www.nukepedia.com/gizmo-downloads/other/envrelight/
>>>> The trick will be to get the reflections to take the camera movement
>>>> into account... perhaps this could work if a sphere camera is attached to
>>>> the animated camera.
>>>>
>>>> Cheers,
>>>> Jordan
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> On Mon, Sep 19, 2011 at 12:09 PM, Hugh Macdonald <
>>>> [email protected]> wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> Do you just want to use the normals directly to map the environment, or
>>>>> do you want to simulate reflections (which require a new vector being
>>>>> calculated)
>>>>>
>>>>>  Hugh Macdonald
>>>>> *n**vizible** – VISUAL EFFECTS
>>>>> *
>>>>> [email protected]
>>>>> +44(0) 20 3167 3860
>>>>> +44(0) 7773 764 708
>>>>>
>>>>> www.nvizible.com
>>>>>
>>>>> On 18 Sep 2011, at 23:43, Jordan Olson wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>> Hey guys!
>>>>> Would you happen to know of any ways or setups which would allow you to
>>>>> remap an environment map or 3D environment onto a CG prop using the camera
>>>>> normals?
>>>>> Cheers,
>>>>> Jordan
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