Just thought of a great idea for a map.
An HDRI Studio Map.
It would output a spherical map with maybe some settings for BG color.
Cyc Wall: #(Boolean)
CyclWall Settings: #(Start Angle, Finish Angle, Color, Intensity, Height)
You could add layers to it for each reflection card which would have controls for:
Shape: #(Rectangle, Disc, Star)
Dimensions: #(Width in degrees, Height in degrees, (or radius))
Longitude: #(degrees)
Latitude: #(degrees)
Color: #(Color Picker)
Intensity: #(Float)
It would draw each of the shapes on the BG in Spherical map space. Then you could load that into a DXShader and get a real-time adjustable HDRI Photo Studio environment.
That would be super super cool… if someone out there was looking for a practical project to practice their map writing skills.
Cool!
Yes. That’s exactly what I would love to see made for max as a map.
Although the price tag leads me to believe that this is a far greater challenge than I was hoping.
you could probably set something like that up with some scripting – creating the actual geometry and rendering that out separately, or driving some Mix’d- / Composite’d-up sub-maps (the projection becomes a problem there, though).