- Sun Nov 22, 2009 10:03 pm
#315233
I think the best results for the money can still be had via the reflective sphere solution. Obviously this gives you a light probe where you need a spherical image for Maxwell but there's a great, cheap plugin called Flexify which will unwrap your light probe into all sorts of configurations and gives a very creditable spherical unwrap.
http://www.flamingpear.com/flexify.html
I have a Gigapan Epic for automatically shooting all the tiles necessary for a spherical panorama and I'd always turn to that for a high quality backplate but if I need hdr info to match the lighting on a shoot, there's generally no time for that. They don't want to stop the main shoot for an hour while I fire off 30 or more shots and all the exposures I need. But I can get in with the chrome ball and knock out 10 or more brackets in a few minutes.
As for panoramic software, I did a huge panoramic shoot recently and I've always used Stitcher but it's getting a bit long in the tooth and has been bought out by Autodesk so I looked at the alternatives. PTGui is very nice, simple to use but for power and accuracy you can't beat Autopano Pro. It takes a while to understand the workflow but it stitches together where everything else fails, I can't recommend it highly enough.
http://www.flamingpear.com/flexify.html
I have a Gigapan Epic for automatically shooting all the tiles necessary for a spherical panorama and I'd always turn to that for a high quality backplate but if I need hdr info to match the lighting on a shoot, there's generally no time for that. They don't want to stop the main shoot for an hour while I fire off 30 or more shots and all the exposures I need. But I can get in with the chrome ball and knock out 10 or more brackets in a few minutes.
As for panoramic software, I did a huge panoramic shoot recently and I've always used Stitcher but it's getting a bit long in the tooth and has been bought out by Autodesk so I looked at the alternatives. PTGui is very nice, simple to use but for power and accuracy you can't beat Autopano Pro. It takes a while to understand the workflow but it stitches together where everything else fails, I can't recommend it highly enough.