Generate Spherical Map Dynamically?

[im.thatoneguy]

Using Mental Mill AE and Max 2010 is it possible to generate a spherical map on the fly? So that an object could reflect other objects in the viewport?

I'm going to go out on a limb and guess no since I've never seen it demonstrated. I assume that the 'reflection component' shader is all you get and it's up to the host application to serve the environment map + object pos spherical map.

I would love to be able to move around reflection cards in real time and see them update in a dx shader. The spherical map could be rendered in viewport at >100 fps so it's just a question of how.

[ruediger]

That's an implementation issue in max - if max would render to a texture this way you could feed it into an environment shader. It seems that this is getting more and more important as the viewport quality is improving more and more.
With mental mill you could write a shader that's querying the light sources and renders some (textured) area light there. This is a nice way to interactively put some kinds of reflection planes in the scene which are reflected by the object's surface.

Best Regards,
Ruediger

[RBURKE]

With mental mill you could write a shader that's querying the light sources and renders some (textured) area light there. This is a nice way to interactively put some kinds of reflection planes in the scene which are reflected by the object's surface.

Best Regards,
Ruediger[/QUOTE]

could you elaborate on this. Im curious if this could be a workaround for mayas lack of render to texture. Ive been trying to figure out a practical way to get planar reflection in maya viewport, and i think what your saying may be on the right track.