render scene to spherical reflecion map?

[smok3]

is there a simple way to render scene into full 360 spherical image map?

[colkai]

Erikki Halkka's "RefGen" is great for this,
http://www.kolumbus.fi/erkki.halkka/plugpak/index.html

[Captain Obvious]

Create a sphere and place it about where the camera is. Make it 100% reflective and bake it to a spherical map.

[smok3]

Captain Obvious, if you are talking about shaders/surface baker i just cant seem to make it work, it will always bake even before the scene is rendered..., any clues? (looking at the f1 it seems that reflections cant bake that way anyway.)

[Captain Obvious]

Oh, right, Surface Baker can't bake reflections. Only diffuse, color and illumination. My bad.

[Weepul]

If you want an HDRI, it's a bit harder, unless Photoshop CS2 can edit HDR images with as much freedom as older versions of Photoshop have with 8-bit images...

Create a fairly high-res sphere, and give it a smoothed, 100% reflective texture. Put it in the scene where you want the "center" to be, and make it really small. Set up a camera with very high zoom factor, make the image dimensions a square, and fill its view with the sphere, the closer to being exactly filled the better.

For "light probe" type images (for use with Image World), place the camera to the side of the sphere, level with the horizon. Render. Take that image into Photoshop, crop off any extra around the sphere if necessary, and apply the Spherize filter with strength of -100%.

For spherical map type images, place the camera directly above the sphere pointing straight down. Render. Take that image into Photoshop, crop off any extra around the sphere if necessary, and apply the Spherize filter with strength of -100% (I -think-. This might not be necessary.) Then apply the Polar Coordinates filter set to Polar to Rectangular. Resize to 3:1 proportions if you want.