Latitude Longitude Shot

I added the new cameras from my sky renderer to Photorealizer, and rendered a new picture of the pool scene using the latitude longitude camera (as always, click the image to view it at full size):

The swimming pool scene shot with my new latitude longitude camera.

(The little nick in the corner near the ladder is a tiny geometry problem, not a renderer problem.)

After saving that image in high dynamic range OpenEXR format, I used it as a latitude longitude environment map to render this image:

Water droplets lit by the high dynamic range version of the above image.

For the PNG version of the latitude longitude shot at the top, I had Photorealizer apply an S-shaped transfer curve to increase the contrast and saturation. Here's what it would have looked like without that:

Display linear.

Pretty washed out.

And here's an earlier version of the render, with shading normals disabled, which resulted in some ugly tessellation artifacts on the water surface:

No shading normals.

Modifying the normal can cause problems such as incident, reflected, or refracted directions ending up on the wrong side of the surface. These types of things can cause light leakage through surfaces or black spots. To avoid problems like these, I came up with a way to strategically modify the problematic directions.

Thanks for looking at my blog!