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Adding Custom Environment Maps To PhotoWorks And RealView

Wednesday, January 16 2008

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

Tools required

HDRShop

Free download of V1 http://projects.ict.usc.edu/graphics/HDRShop/

nVidia photoshop .dds plugin

Free download http://developer.nvidia.com/object/photoshop_dds_plugins.html

Adobe PhotoShop

SolidWorks Office (with PhotoWorks addin)

Content required

360 degree spherical environment image, there are many resources on the web for obtaining these. With HDRShop and a digital camera, you can even create your own.

Steps required

Starting with a spherical environment image:
Open the image in hdrshop (say OK to default "Specify Camera Response Curve for LDR Image" dialog)
Choose Image, Panorama, Panoramic Transformation
- Source image format = Latitude/Longitude
- Destination image format = Cube Environment (Vertical Cross)
When the conversion completes, you will have a new "vertical cross" image that will look like the following image (on the right). This corresponds to the "layout" guide (on the left) Save the resulting image and then open it in PhotoShop
Use the grid control to easily select and modify the layout of the vertical cross image into a row of images as follows. Take special care to get the overall size orientation of each part of the image correct.
- New image Width = 3072 pixels, Height = 512 pixels
- Right, Left, and Rear parts of the image are rotated 180 degrees from their original position in the vertical cross.
Now save the image from PhotoShop as a DDS file using the following options
Now you can use the PhotoWorks scene editor to set this new .dds image as your environment (and background if you wish to see it as background as well)
Environment Reflections Only

Or Background and Environment settings together

Scene modified with custom .dds background, environment in RealView (as well as Ambient Occlusion)

Comments

wouter wrote on Thursday, October 2 2008

Can solidworks handle floating point formats? Cause I see you're already using a LDR image in the hdr shop stage, so I guess the dds option is also a normal LDR image.

Floating point (hdr) images would result in much more realistic reflections and lighting, if solidworks can handle them.

I read that these maps can be used for global illumination so I wonder what the use of this function is without a HDR environment. Lighting will look very wrong if you use a LDR environment map for GI (by wrong I mean totally different than the lighting where the environment was shot).

Nikolet wrote on Wednesday, March 19 2008

Nice site!

Ron Bates wrote on Tuesday, January 22 2008

hdrshop v1.0 also offers a variety of ways to transform images from one type (panoramic, mirrored ball, etc) to other formats, including the cube cross needed in this example. The website for hdrshop referenced above has some tutorials on how to use those transformation utilities too.

Charles Parez wrote on Tuesday, January 22 2008

In the (likely) event that you don't have a spherical image laying around, it's possible to stitch together a series of wide-angle (>60 deg) shots. There are a variety of programs which do this; I used Panoweaver 5.0 (demoware).

Charles Parez wrote on Tuesday, January 22 2008

... which means Gimp isn't supported. I've tried with the latest version of Gimp and .dds plugin and can confirm that nothing good happens. I suppose I got what I paid for. Sorry everyone!