More fun with reflecting balls

May 17, 2005 | Computer Graphics, My Photos, My Projects | By: Mark VandeWettering

After yesterday’s post, I decided that I’d like to try to make some better reflection maps. So I shot this image of my office reflecting in a Christmas tree ball. The image is pretty noisy because my office isn’t brightly lit. (Addendum: I also had the camera set for outdoor white balance, which makes the overall image look pretty crufty. I just shot a different image, and got this better image, which has a magenta hue, but isn’t yellow orange at least.) I then cropped it to a square containing just the ball, and passed it through my unwarping program:

Cylindrical Projection of My Office

I have a different version of my program that produces a cube map, which is perhaps more intelligible (click on it for a bigger version):


Cube Map of My Office

It appears that the quality is pretty much limited by the poor surface of the reflecting ball. You can see a lump in the ball causes the book in the foreground to have a distorted outline.

Still, fun stuff.