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I am going to be doing some work which requires the need for SSS, and from what I have understood, using IBL causes the SSS to clear much much faster. I have a lighting setup already created in Maxwell and was wondering if there is a way to render out the entire environment, from within studio, to use as an IBL image. Keep in mind this is a studio photo lighting setup for a product, so the lights are very close to the object.

is there a way to do this in studio?

Should be possible to do as in real life.
Placing a chrome ball in the center, render from two different angles and then save out the result at different exposures and generate a HDRI with another software. ( like http://www.hdrshop.com )
( I think the old v1 version is free for noncommercial use? )

That said...I havn't actually tried it myself.... I have a camera and a tripod, bought a chromed hemispherical lampshade, and then couldn't figure out a good way to actually get that halfsphere mounted on something that would be easy to carry around. ( I'm all thumbs )
But a sphere in a virtual studio should work fine!?

Same thing as Lars is suggesting you can do in Studio. Put "a perfect mirror sphere" on a place you would like to have visualized product, set up a camera to see only a sphere, render, convert image to spherical mapping... Use it for IBL.

Or you can make few shots as panorama then composite in Photoshop (or other SW).

Wish I could render 360° image directly in Maxwell. I think you can render such image in Lightwave or Cinema. It is like having a camera with 360° field of view.

thanks guys, i'll try that. do you have any links to tutorials for creating these once i have my images? I need to render the front and back of the mirrored ball to use correct? I tried converting these using HDR Shop, but it's just not looking like i did it correctly. I couldn't rally find any tutorials to help me out when i searched

I think one shot is enough. Especially if you use long focal length on your virtual camera. Two shots are required in real world, to eliminate camera image from final HDRI.

You can use then Cinema to convert spherical to latlong mapping.

"Render/Convert HDR Probe..."

If you do not have Cinema, you can use HDRShop:

to convert a spherical hdr to a latlong hdr,
goto hdrshop->image->panorama->panoramic transformations
source image -> format = mirrored ball
destination image -> format = Latitude/Longitude
-> ok

There is also special program to work with HDRI. For example:

http://www.doschdesign.com/products/hdr ... sh_V1.html

I have not tested it.

won't i need 2 balls though? one for the back? i have lighting infront of the object and behind the object, so i would think I would need 2 to capture the full 360 degree range??

Also, for some reason my IBL images aren't showing up in the viewport. It's hard to know if they are facing the correct direction...they used to show up, but no longer :-\

See this tutorial:
http://www.maxwellrender.com/forum/view ... 15&t=20199

You just need to set up two cameras, not two reflective spheres.

Press the K key on your keyboard to switch on/off the viewport display of IBL maps and physical sky.

Thank you Mihai, I did not know about that tutorial. Second camera eliminates bad area behind the first camera (and vise versa). It adds one extra step to make enviro map perfect.

once there was possibility to use export panorama in 3dmax it seems like it don,t work any more. Is it plugin issue ?