From the course: 3ds Max: Rendering with Arnold

Panorama rendering with a spherical camera - 3ds Max Tutorial

From the course: 3ds Max: Rendering with Arnold

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Panorama rendering with a spherical camera

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- [Instructor] Rendering a an environmental panorama is easy in Arnold using the Arnold spherical camera. All you need to do is create the spherical camera, drop it into your scene, and set the render resolution to a two to one aspect ratio. I'm going to render this cafe, in its entirety, and I want the camera to be focused on the till, or the cash register, and that'll be the center of the environmental panorama. Let's create the camera. Go to the Create panel, to Cameras, from the pull down list, choose Arnold and click the Spherical button, and you may see some parameters here in the Create panel, but don't be fooled, that's actually spurious, there are no parameters for an Arnold spherical camera. We can create it in the left view port here, and it'll be facing in the correct direction. So just click in the left view. And as soon as we click, then we're taken automatically to the Modified panel, and we can that in fact there are no parameters for a spherical camera. Let's position it so that it's looking at the cash register. I know what values I want for that, so I'll just plug them in. Grab the Move tool, and in the transform type in area at the bottom, we'll set the X position value to -200 centimeters. Press Tab, set the Y position to -300 centimeters. Press Tab, and the Z position, or elevation, to 160 centimeters. And now we can see in our perspective view, that the camera is positioned just where we want it. We can load the camera into a view port, but it's not going to look like much. We can, for example, go up to our front view port, click on the view port label, and choose Cameras, arnold_spherical_camera, and we get this extreme wide angle projection here. So we won't really know what that rendering is going to look like until we actually do the production render. Now let's go to the render set up dialogue and choose the camera and aspect ratio, click Render Setup, and the View to Render should be the Arnold spherical camera. We want to make sure that we select the correct view port, and then lock it, and then down in the Output Size here, we want to have an Image Aspect of two to one. And that way we'll get a proper equirectangular or lat-long projection. We want to disable the Image Aspect lock, turn that off, and plug in some values here to give us a two to one aspect. For example, we can set the Width to 512, and the Height to 256, just for testing purposes. And now we have an Image Aspect of two, and a Pixel Aspect of one. All we need to do now is just click the Render button, and in our rendered frame window, we'll start to see an equirectangular projection. That's how to create a lat-long, or equirectangular projection using the Arnold spherical camera.

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