I use the following technique to make angular maps for Blender backgrounds and HDRI IBL in YafaRay. This technique doesn't require that you have animation functionality. I am using Windows Vista.
First, download the free tools Cube2Cross and HDRShop:
http://www2.cs.uh.edu/~somalley/hdri.htmlhttp://projects.ict.usc.edu/graphics/HDRShop/Basically, you just need to render six 90 degree views. Set your camera for a 90 degree FOV, both horizontal and vertical. And set your render resolution such that horizontal and vertical dimensions are the same.
Camera rotations:
front: 0,0,0
right: 0,90,0
back: 0,180,0
left: 0,270,0
up: 90,0,0
down: -90,0,0
To get it all to render at once, I just save six version of the file, each with the appropriate camera rotation, and then run TG2 from the command line with a batch file that runs all six in a row. But you can do each one manually if you want.
Here is what a typical batch file like this might look like:
Quotetgdcli -p scene_ft.tgd -hide -exit -r -o scene_ft.exr
tgdcli -p scene_rt.tgd -hide -exit -r -o scene_rt.exr
tgdcli -p scene_bk.tgd -hide -exit -r -o scene_bk.exr
tgdcli -p scene_lt.tgd -hide -exit -r -o scene_lt.exr
tgdcli -p scene_up.tgd -hide -exit -r -o scene_up.exr
tgdcli -p scene_dn.tgd -hide -exit -r -o scene_dn.exr
To use the batch file like this in any folder, you need to first add the Terragen folder to your path in your environment variables.
For Cube2Cross, you need the end of the file names to be exactly "_ft" for front, "_rt" for right, and so on, as above. This is critical. And for HDR applications, you need to render to the OpenEXR format. Unfortunately, Cube2Cross wants the files in the Radiance HDR format, and TG2 can't output in this format, so you need to convert the EXR files to HDR. I do this with Photoshop. I use an action and the batch tool to automate it.
Once you have the six HDR files, you need to run Cube2Cross in the same folder. I just put the Cube2Cross executable in the folder in which I have these six HDR files. Cube2Cross automatically finds those files and stitches them into a cross and outputs a file called "..._cross.hdr".
Now, open that HDR file with HDRShop. Once you have this in HDRShop, go to the 'images' menu and select 'panoramic' and 'panoramic transformations'. For the source image side, make sure to set the format to "cubic environment (vertical cross)". On the destination side, set the format to whatever format you need for your application. Set the resolution you need. I use the light probe angular map format often for Blender. You can also use latitude/longitude to get the format you need for lots of apps. I suggest turning off bilinear interpolation, as it will make lines along your seams.
Now just save the new image in HDRShop in an HDR format, and you are ready to take that file to whatever other app you are using.
Also, I haven't tried it for this, but there is an open source stitching program called Hugin that might be an alternative to the Autodesk software mentioned above:
http://hugin.sourceforge.net/I use it to stitch multiple photographs together and it has worked flawlessly for me for that purpose.
