HDRI Community

In XSI, we have 5 formats to choose from for environment maps:

spherical
cylindrical
cubic strip (6 cubic faces arranged in a 6x1 configuration)
cubic cross (6 cubic faces arranged in a "t" shape)
cubic cross sideways (6 cubic faces arranged in a "t" turned on its side, long end pointing right)

And of course, there's the probe format, though it's not supported directly.

I've also noticed that a lot of games use a cubic "+" configuration with the upper left corner filled with the 6th cube, like:

xxo
xxx
oxo

which is efficient for scenarios when you need square textures (games).

What's the story with the currently supported formats?  The four I see are spherical, cylindrical, angular and screen.  Spherical and cylindrical are obvious.  I'm assuming "angular" is refering to the probe maps that look like a big round ball, right?  And from the spec, "screen" is a rectangular background card.

Personally, I'm a pretty big fan of the cubic cross maps for 3 reasons:

1) You can generate them from 3D scenes really easily using and array of 6 standard pinhole cameras.
2) Warping/pinching is minimized
3) They are widely available.

So, if I were to try to add support for these formats to the XSI version of the plugin, what do you guys think would be the best way to go about it?  Can we maybe just add some map types to the spec?

-Andy

Nice idea, to support cubic maps,
although the implementation of the projection transformation is a bit tricky, (but solveable)

The only thing is: I'm not a favorite towards the cubic cross format, because they are invitation for memory waste (if implmented the wrong.)

But in general nice idea.

chris

Well I do have  question: / wish

Could both of you describe the order of the faces ?
After some more tests, it seems this is not allways the same / depending on soft used.

thanks
chris

Please don't forget, that we want to design a crossplatform tool!

If we start supporting a projectiontype, which isn't supported on all available 3d apps, we maybe loose some agruments why the SDR is so great.

as far as i know , max doesn't support cubic mapping.