"What is the best (and easiest) way to insert a digital pic of a building's neighborhood so that it will show up in a camera shot of the exterior of a building.
I was thinking of mapping it to a wall that surrounds the whole site. That way I could get a background around the whole site and could use it to give the building some background in the VR object movie. """"""
Excerpted from a draft of the new "LightWorks In ArchiCAD" due out soon this milennium:
This is a cinematic challenge.
While the topic is covered by the GDL Cookbook where a "cyclorama" object is created using a picture map, this approach is somewhat outdated since the LightWorks engine permits more sophisticated effect with materials.....
This is done by making a cycloramic wall, except that ArchiCAD can only make a 180 degree wall and will break the circle into two halves.
You'll want to assemble your panoramic imagery into two images that would each equal 180 degrees of the panorama.
Create two new materials in the LightWorks definition - and use "constant" reflectance. This will make the images equally luminant regardless of the sun direction.
Pay attention to the aspect ratio of the two images. It is juducious to add extra sky to the panorama so you never see the top of the wall. You'll also need some mid-ground model bits to obscure the distant image/cyclorama base edge. This cab be doe with an inner cyclorama wallset of trees or other buildings with the sky masked out.
When you size the image, it must equal the actual circumference of the half wall and the actual height of the wall must match the resulting height of the image.....
Place the wall with the horizon line in the image equal to the camera height.
You will of course, need to align the texture in the 3D window, and to do this, you'll need to map the photo image in the Internal engine window as well in order to see the texture in OpenGL 3D views. Of course you will have "textures" on on the OpenGL rendering options dialog.
The orientation of the image might be backwards and invertedonce applied in LightWorks, so be sure to create the cyclorama wall with hotspots inside the circle, and [here is where we separate the men from the boys for our own nefarious purposes] you'll want to invert the image 180 degrees in the LightWorks dialog - texture space> Graphisoft replicate> Angle: 180 degrees.
If the sun is too low in the sky, the shadow cast from the wall interferes with foreground elements. You must carefully balance the sun angle with wall height with camera view angle to avoid problems.
PS: Also put the sky color in the background image of the rendering to minimise problems- see attached for what happens when you see the top of the wall.....
Good luck.....
I'll put you down for ten copies of the book.
Dwight Atkinson
