Which renderers support rendering to equirectangular?

Brazil has lens type Env mapper, which allows rendering a 360° spherical panorama in equirectangular projection.

Are there other Rhino renderers offering the same feature?

(Brazil is a bit expensive for a feature that I use from time to time just for fun.)

I’ve used Arion for this type of render in the past too. I bet Vray can do it as well but @fpedrogo can say for sure. I’m sure there are others…

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Or you can just “take a picture” of a chrome ball within your scene and convert it.

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[Maxwell 3][1] (link to respective page in docs) does this. They have free academic licenses.
[1]: http://support.nextlimit.com/display/mxdocsv3/Camera+Lenses

V-Ray have several cameras including fisheyes and spherical camera. With either of those cameras, you can create a 360 panoramic effect

Thanks for the suggestions! All mentioned products are quite expensive, though. As a hobbyist, I’d like to see more companies offer software for rent, per hour, like on Amazon Web Services.

I use V-Ray a lot and there is a FREE trial-demo version you can get to test it out. If you are a student, Check out this website where you can buy V-Ray for $138 for the full version, with reasonable render size limitations.

V-Ray for Rhino Demo Limitations

  • Distributed Rendering limited to 2 render nodes

  • produces watermarked images

  • resolution up to 600x400

  • rendered results limited to 4 lights

No, I’m not a student. My use of Rhino is mostly hobbyist. That’s also why I’m fine with my main computer being an i3. For the occasional rendering job (or for video), I boot up a fat AWS instance for some hours. Tools I prefer to rent rather than to buy.

Here’s something that I just did with the Brazil trial:

I formatted my computer and now I just remember what free HDR editing software I had, I think it was HDR Shop but there is no such thing according to google. Guy remember this one (or something alike), popular years ago?

The last few versions of Photoshop will open and edit HDR images. I’ve used it for basic editing and it works well.

Also, the website for hdrshop is now up. It might have been down when you looked. I also remember it used to be free, but the current price is US $199. For that price, I’d stick with Photoshop unless you need some of their advanced HDR-specific features.

Yepp, that’s the one! TKS!

Does Photoshop converts the map formats?

@feklee, HDRShop can convert a chromeball into any format you want, that’s why I was asking.

I see. However, when rendering to a chrome ball, I assume very high resolution is needed to get an equirectangular image of decent resolution. All in all, this approach looks impractical, at least to me.

The RhinoCycles plugin I am developing will eventually support equirectangular panorama, since Cycles supports it. Note that this will be for Rhino 6.

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Yep, you’re right.

I’ve used the chrome ball approach successfully many times but I was creating env maps for use with Rhino shading modes, so I never needed the back of it to look good.

Looking forward to RhinoCycles. :smiley:

Hi @nathanletwory

It would be great to have this feature in cycles!
Any perspective on when it might be available in Rhino V6?

Probably not in v6, but in the WIP definitely at some point.

Only for the record - Vray 3 support stereo equirectangular too. :slight_smile:

OK, Thanks Nathan and Micha.
I know about my options now :slight_smile: