Camera Mapping a 360 Photo in C4D R20
How to do 360 Camera Mapping in Cinema 4D R20 using the new node based material system.
C4D already has a great workflow for camera mapping regular photos, and there are tons of tutorials on the subject. However, trying to map a 360 photo requires a completely different approach to the problem. Once you know how though, I would argue that it is easier than traditional camera mapping.
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Setting the scene
For this tutorial, I am using a 360 kitchen photo I found on iStock.
Start by going through the steps of setting up an environment. Create a new material and input the 360 image in the luminance channel. You can disable all other channels. Make a new sky object and slap the texture onto it. Now you should see the 360 photo as a background in your viewport.
Next, create a new camera and set all of its transforms to 0, so that it is at the origin of the scene. Give it a Protection tag and disable the rotation lock. It might be helpful to widen its field of view so you can see more of the scene. This is your reference camera where you’ll also be doing a lot of your modelling.
Creating the material
Create a new Node material by going to Create>New Node Material or using the keyboard shortcut Cmd+Alt+N. For our 360 mapping material, we only need two nodes in addition to the Material.1 node that gets created automatically: an image node and a projection node. You can use the keyboard shortcut C to make finding them quicker. Select your 360 image in the File input field on the image node and connect it to the emission channel of the material. In the projection node, set the projection to Spherical and the coordinate system to World. Connect the result to the Context input of the material. That’s it, you now have a material that will use the 360 image as a texture and line up perfectly with the background when viewed from the reference camera we set up earlier.
Note: As of this writing, the viewport will not preview the material correctly. To overcome this, set up an interactive render to preview what it looks like in almost-realtime.
Modelling the room
The rest of the tutorial should be pretty familiar if you’ve done any sort of camera mapping before. A lot of eyeballing and guesstimating coming up. Using the reference camera, I start by creating a reference plane and match the size and position to a section of the floor.
Then I apply the material. Note how the material looks different outside of my interactive render region.
From here it mostly comes down to modelling skills of which I possess few. Extruding edges and loop cuts got me most of the way. Pop out of the reference camera from time to time to check that your geometry looks okay.
And eventually we should end up with something that allows us to move around in what was originally just a 360 photo, like so:
Hopefully Maxon will eventually fix the viewport issues I encountered while solving this issue. As of this writing, node materials are quite a new feature, so it’s understandable that they may be in need of some tweaks.
Thanks for reading, and I hope these tips will prove useful to future Googlers.
