ja4161
03-09-2012, 04:36 PM
Hey all,
Last night I wanted to try something different. I wanted to capture interior detail of a building such that I was able to preserve the paralax effect of someone walking by the building and peering through the window, however I wanted this to have a minimal effect on my poly count. To do this, I came up with two solutions. Both involved placing a box on the interior side of the window. For the method I'm showing in the linked video, I gave the box a glass material in 3DS Max with no reflectivity. I then created a camera on the exterior of the building where a person might be viewing through the window. On the interior of the building, I had actual geometry that I wanted to capture... a series of archways. I hid the building and did a render to texture on the box with glass material. The result was that I was able to capture everything I'd see through the box, i.e., the series of archways, in the rendered texture. I then deleted the archways and replaced the glass material with the newly rendered texture. You can see the final product in the linked video.
An alternative way that I tested out was to render the archways from the appropriate angle and camera project that onto the box and, again, render-to-texture a complete map. Both ways seem to work pretty well although there was a bit more distortion in the first method.
I didn't want to simply map the environment to the window panes because that feels too static. I'm curious if anyone else might have a better solution to this. This is a technique that I came up with myself, although I'm quite sure I'm not the first to do something like this. Any advice anyone wants to offer would be greatly appreciated.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CEZJoJiuH2o&feature=youtu.be
Last night I wanted to try something different. I wanted to capture interior detail of a building such that I was able to preserve the paralax effect of someone walking by the building and peering through the window, however I wanted this to have a minimal effect on my poly count. To do this, I came up with two solutions. Both involved placing a box on the interior side of the window. For the method I'm showing in the linked video, I gave the box a glass material in 3DS Max with no reflectivity. I then created a camera on the exterior of the building where a person might be viewing through the window. On the interior of the building, I had actual geometry that I wanted to capture... a series of archways. I hid the building and did a render to texture on the box with glass material. The result was that I was able to capture everything I'd see through the box, i.e., the series of archways, in the rendered texture. I then deleted the archways and replaced the glass material with the newly rendered texture. You can see the final product in the linked video.
An alternative way that I tested out was to render the archways from the appropriate angle and camera project that onto the box and, again, render-to-texture a complete map. Both ways seem to work pretty well although there was a bit more distortion in the first method.
I didn't want to simply map the environment to the window panes because that feels too static. I'm curious if anyone else might have a better solution to this. This is a technique that I came up with myself, although I'm quite sure I'm not the first to do something like this. Any advice anyone wants to offer would be greatly appreciated.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CEZJoJiuH2o&feature=youtu.be