Cyclorama Background - where and why and how

[Dwight]

An Un-Named Alert Reader sent this message privately:

You said using ciclorama background...defies shadows and Highlights. But How?
I went to Image/Photorendering settings/Background/Picture and there are only Archicad's own files. If I go to Class/Background/mage I get thr same. Archicad documentation don't explain nothing ablout, neither explain what kind of work (visually) the shaders do. Could you help me with this ciclorama background?

I thought. Why make a big essay and not get posting credit? So here's the guy's answer to making stage set fakery like experienced by Truman Burbank in the Truman Show when he hits the wall in the sail boat:

1: Get David Nicholson-Coles' GDL Cookbook. Page 2:150 the Voyager section. In Canada, in the old days, a voyageur was a smelly French-Canadian who canoes up river to trade with Natives for pelts, offering shiny baubles and whiskey. Why did they give them guns? Idiots for Beaver!

2: This section outlines how to make a 360 degree panoramic cylorama that calls a filename as its surface.

3: But never mind, as you can easily make a 180 degree panorama using a curved wall object and any material, altho it helps if you specifically map your background to the exact size of the wall. You use the 3D window to position the origin of the mapped material. After 180 degrees, the wall repeats itself, but you can reapply the material and reoriginate it .....

4: You are using a cyclorama because you are moving around in a space with an animation and need to have contiguity of image as the camera view rotates. So the wall you build need to be covering all of the view aspect.

5: It gets tricky, because walls cast a shadow so your cyclorama can't be so high and incusive as to block out the sun. I am currently using a sun angle of 20 degrees to simulate late post--coital afternoon sun and the wall shadow is just below the floor plane. Phew!

6: You want the material you make to cover this wall "Constant" in its reflection quality so it looks the same in any condition - same with these other elements: fake fluorescent lights, fire in fireplace, and backlit signs.

7: Study "Pi" as it will tell you your circumferential sizes.

8: There is no eight.

9: To get fancy, say, if you have mountains, forests and background buildings in your picture, you can make several successive cyclorama cylinders, each masking out more of the background - ie one is conplete, one knocks out mountains, the last one knocks out the trees. As you move around the space these elements will move relative to each other. It isn't realistic but makes a dynamic feeling.

10: Source images must be loaded into the library as any texture images must.

11: That's enough commandments for now, since we have reached ten

[Dwight]

masked and unmasked sky

[Dwight]

and why you use this:

both images have the same background, just viewpoint shifts during same sequence

[Dwight]

turn to left

[Anonymous]

Thanks Dwight:

I could not imagine that the ciclorama was a beatiful round prison. The trick works but it is an absurd trick. Following this thought then a dome is a thin semi sphere with a mapped picture. It would be better to use a hdr file but it seems that Archicad bought the cheapest frank in Lightworks. This is very dissappointment.

[Dwight]

Huh?

[Anonymous]

Someone needs to check this guy out, similar subject but looking up instead. What a rig!

http://www.philohome.com/skyshooter/skyshooter.htm

[Anonymous]

What a kick!

I checked out the two sites below and I was able to download their Sky Domes, and map them to the inside of a sphere with Cinema 4D. Then I placed a camera inside and when you pan the sphere it creates the illusion of being in the sky.

Of course then I needed to place a cone in front of the camera to finish off the effect. Enjoy.

A hemisphere would make a perfect background for a rendered building.


My 2.58 MB test can be seen at:

http://www.Burginger.com/ARCHICAD_TALK/PANO/PANO_TEST2.mov


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http://www.philohome.com/gallery.htm

http://www.philohome.com/skycollec/skycollec.htm

http://scotthaefner.com/kap/360panos/


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Panoramica

http://www.marlinstudios.com/samples/samples.htm

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http://www.1000skies.com/