Capturing a 2d image map from a ray traced reflected image

Rhino Rhino for Windows
5

Hi Zack, ok i´ll try to explain what i did, however it might sound confusing if you´re using AIR & BakeAir the first time :smiley:

  1. Removed your mesh sphere, i´ve did it with a single sphere to make it easier to follow.
  2. If you have downloaded AIR and RhinoAir, you´ll need to set the scene up for shadowless rendering:
  3. Rhino Options / Air Main / Air GI set the GI mode to “Ambient” for constant lightning
  4. Rhino Options / Air Main / Environment set the Env to Color (white) for constant background
  5. To the nurbs sphere, i assigned a metal shader with zero diffuse and 100% reflection
  6. To your circular projector, i´ve assigned a constant material shader and your number_grid texture
  7. To bake the nurbs sphere, i´ve used my old BakeRender plugin with channel set to __reflect
  8. In the plugin dialog, i´ve defined a map name and resolution 2048x2048
  9. Then baked, the map is assigned automatically if that option was enabled

The result was the map attached below.

you will probably need to assign it to the nurbs sphere to see it: UnwrapReflectionTest.3dm (517.4 KB)

Once this is done, you can split the nurbs sphere in parts (eg. 12) using Split with Isocurve option, in V-Direction. Make shure that the Shrink option is set to No when you do this. I´ve marked the points to snap to on the sphere. Finally the splitted sphere segments can be meshed and unwrapped using _Squish as described here, to maintain the mapping…

is this what you`re trying to do ?

EDIT: you can as well do the whole process without splitting the nurbs sphere at the end, just use your 12 meshed sphere segments in step 1 instead of the nurbs sphere (with spherical mapping assigned) and bake 12 maps instead of a single one.

c.