This is just a further exploration of that Global Image trick I discovered some time ago. All you have to do is boolean a sphere with a slightly smaller sphere, to make a hollow...sphere. Then I place any thing (scene) inside this boolean, apply a real world photograph texture on said booleaned sphere and there ya go, anything reflective/transparent inside will have a photo-realistic look to it, because it will reflect the image around it. Anyway, I had done this before with highly reflective objects in my gallery, never occured to me `til now to try a glass object. Turned out fairly good, probably make a bigger scene out of it. Bryce 4, a little Photoshop. AgentSmith

Looking good! I will have to try this!

Attached Link: http://www.renderring.com/hdri/bloblinks.html

Cool AgentS. I had inadvertently discovered the same technique about a month ago. Here is a quicktime object movie I made using a spherical panorama and three metaballs: http://www.renderring.com/hdri/bloblinks.html I also figured a way to "back light hdri" a scene and also render your own bryce scenes for use as on of the hdri "covers." Give me a day or so to compile the info on my site and I will post the url.

By the way, all of the stuff I just posted was all bryce with default render settings...no premium effects.

By the way, all of the stuff I just posted was all bryce with default render settings...no premium effects.

Very cool!

Great stuff, but you don't need boolean spheres. Stick the scene inside of a single normal sphere and Bryce will treat it as hollow anyway. That's how I did this pic (full-sized version in my gallery). You might find it speeds up render time a little, too.

Ah! AgentSmith is back in da house! Love your realism tricks. Tuttles image is extremely cool too. By the way: What's HDRI exactly?

Attached Link: http://www.silverblades-suitcase.com/

Hm, hwo do you get the picture to become properly spherical? Do you use a plugin in Photoshop to make the original square image "cartesian" for mapping to a sphere? very interesting! :)

Attached Link: http://www.debevec.org

HDRI are images that are a combination of a handful of images of the same exact photo, each picture will be taken at different apertures, etc. This will provide much more information as far as more acuurate renders go, etc. High Definition Resolution Image. They can't be used outright in Bryce. Bryce doesn't have the capability to decipher an HDRI. But, a lot of HDRI's tend to be used for the above application (to be stuck on a big sphere), so they are 2D processed so they willl later fit onto a 3D sphere and look normal. So, yes people use Photoshop, and other programs to edit these pics to make them fit onto spheres. It's kinda like UVMapping a texture to later fit onto a sphere. There is a TON of info on all this stuff, more than I could ever type out here. If you want to learn more take that link and start reading, and keep reading...The term they use for the photo image I used above is "Light Probe", there is a gallery of them there. AgentSmith

Dowt! Uh, sorry, mistake there, it's not high definition resolution image... It's stands for "High Dynamic Range Image". AgentSmith

Yes. Most higher end apps such as lightwave apply this image virtually, so it does not even really exist as a visible object or picture. Instead the information the HDRI contains is used in conjunction with global illumination to produce chromatic global lighting scemes as well as accurate reflection mapping.

Attached Link: http://www.redshoesdigital.com

Funny this topic should come up. I started doing sphere within a shpere within a sphere stuff a few weeks ago. I also experiemented with reflections to get a curved horizion. Your comments as well as the URL will ad to my knowledge. Thanks!

Oh, Tuttle...here is why I use and suggest a booleaned sphere. For some reason, I myself get lot of "noise" in my glass transparencies/reflections unless I use a booleaned sphere. Don't know why, and I have tried ENDLESS combinations to make it go away with just a plain sphere, yet it won't. Probably just the result of that darned Gypsy curse... So to avoid troubleshooting others, I just suggest the boolean off the bat, is all. It affects my glass big time, but not really metals (too much). In the end, it's most likely just me and my strange ways... AgentSmith

Oh right - I used a crappy grainy photo anyway, so I didn't notice the difference! I'll bear that in mind... :)

AgentSmith, you're right about the sphere versus boolean. I found this out by accident but never truly understood why this happened. I was modeling marbles - glass spheres with other objects inside them. Several came out very clear. Others I added later had the bubble thing going on because I had forgotten that I used a boolean sphere the first time. Amazing what experimenting will do. :-)

I guess it's good if you want to imitate a snow globe. (hey, ya never know) AS

RE Gypsie curse: Could it be artifacts created by intersecting lights? I noticed an artifact effect when I used volumetric lights to try to create a light dome. - TJ

My pics up there are done with just one light. Just the sun absolutley directly above, slightly grey. The globe image itself ends up creating what looks like light coming in from different areas. AgentSmith

Agent Smith, I was thinking that the refraction of the glass could bend the light rays in a non-parallel way such that rays could intersect even with only one light source, but at this point that is just a guess. The interface between the inner and outer globes could also act as a reflective surface, especially if the attributes of the two globes are not exactly the same. It's been along time since I studied optical petrography so it would be easy for me to be wrong on both counts. Either way the effect you ended up with is very neat. Thanks for sharing the trick. I'm sure I'll end up playing with it, - TJ

Find panoramas on the web and then extract the data using a vr editor. You can aslo use cube faces...I am still writing the tutorial.

This looks really good. But where can you get 360* photo's?

You have to search for equirectangular in google but there are not too many of them. Usually regular side to side panoramas work fine as well.

thanks