Back in January, we posted a cool procedure for Adding Custom Environment Maps To PhotoWorks And RealView. Understandably excited (man, I need a hobby) I decided to test our claim that with a digital camera and HDR Shop, you can create your own spherical environment. I quickly discovered that creating your own spherical environment can be a bit more involved than that, and I hope that this post on my own experience helps you create awesome SolidWorks renderings.

Minimum Hardware

Like we said in the January post, a digital camera and a tripod is all you really need to make a 360 environment.

The quickest and easiest way to generate an HDR environment map is with a reflective sphere and HDR Shop. You can use a highly polished steel ball bearing, a garden gazing globe, or even a holiday ornament.

Holiday ornament in the center of our office

Polished steel sphere in my hallway

The tutorials for creating the HDRI are on the HDR Shop website.

I've found that the quality of the images generated from this method will not be good enough for a background image, but will work just fine for a reflective environment.

Render of a globe in a library. Note poor background quality with good reflection quality.

Recommended Hardware

Digital camera, with "M" (Manual Exposure) mode.

Wideangle or "fisheye" lens *

Tripod with a level

Plummet - I used some string and a pen

* Look online to see if you are able to rent lenses. I was able to rent a fisheye lens from California, US for a fraction of the cost of the actual lens.

Software

There are many commercial HDR panorama creation tools out there. Also, the open source community has also created some interesting apps with which I created some very nice panoramas. These are the 2 apps I ended up using:

Hugin

Autopano SIFT

Setup

Note that I've hung a plummet from the focal point of the camera. I've also mounted a level to the camera, thus creating a philopod.

Select your location and start shooting. The number of shots you need to take depends on how wide your lens is. I had an 8mm lens with 106deg field of view, and I needed to take 6 pictures.

If your intent is to create an HDR (High Dynamic Range) image, take at least 3 bracketed exposures for each camera position. Later, you can use HDRShop or Photoshop to blend them together to make an HDR image.

Pixel Pushing

The workflow of hugin isn't too difficult to understand and there are a variety of tutorials found on the hugin website.

Final Results

Capitol Building of Wisconsin, USA

Download Files

Empty Office

Download Files

In the Technical Training Sessions of SolidWorks World 2008, Brian Harrison chaired an interactive discussion on SolidWorks Labs. Below are the slides presented in this session.

Using some registry settings you can enable an option to use Ambient Occlusion in any scene.

The standard “Ambient Occlusion” scene can really make your models stand out a lot more and look much more realistic.

But what if you really want to use Ambient Occlusion but keep a plain white background with the kitchen scene reflections?

Here's a detailed explanation how to take your spherical environment image and map it for use in PhotoWorks and RealView in SW 2008.

Come see the presentation about Labs by Brian Harrison, Director of SolidWorks Labs. You'll learn about what has happened with Labs this past year and get a sneak peek into an upcoming release on Labs.

Look for the presentation in the SolidWorks World User Agenda at 1:30pm on Monday January, 21st.

Our latest widget, the Gallery Widget, enables you to show off all of your favorite designs... right on your desktop. This widget, just like our WatchIt Widget, requires the Yahoo Widget Engine to be installed on your system. If you have not yet installed Yahoo Widgets, you can do so by following this link. By default Yahoo will install about dozen or so widgets that they think most people will want. After the installation you can simply right-click on any widget that you do not want, and select" Close Widget". It will not open again, but it will still be in your widgets folder, usually located in "My Documents/My Widgets/".

After you have installed Yahoo Widgets, go to labs.solidworks.com and download the Gallery Widget to your widgets folder. Once the download has completed, just double-click on the file named Gallery.widget to launch it. By default Gallery will display the 2006 design contest winning models. If you place your mouse pointer over the image being displayed you will see info about that design. To start showcasing your own designs, simply drag and drop a folder containing your SolidWorks models on top of the Gallery widget. By default, Gallery will display models in subfolders as well.