Christmas Was Here 360º Panorama

Description:

Our (belated) Christmas present to the community.

This space is the Christmas of our youth, the place that feels most like home, and a part of who we are.

Enjoy the usage of this pano as much as we enjoyed growing up in such a unique environment.

A HIGH RES EXR of the panorama used in this file can be found at

BlendedSkies.com!

Thanks to David Strebel for his awesome Cycles HDRI setup.

We have have altered it slightly so that all you have to dois plug in your HDR panorama, move the ground plane and objects towhere you want them, and render.

HINT: to get

real time viewing for the placement of objects, set yourdisplay view to "rendered" (GPU or CPU).

Then, under the "Film" settingsin the Properties panel, unclick the "Transparent" button.

MAKE SURE THIS BOX is CHECKED BEFORE RENDERING- or the shadow layer will not render.

The original for David's excellent .blend can be found at:

http://www.blendswap.com/blends/view/68138

ADDITIONAL thanks to Ben Simonds of Gecko Animation, Ltd. for his MOST EXCELLENT HDRI NODE SETUP.

We liked it so much we are now inlcuding it in all of our .blends:

http://bensimonds.com/2013/11/07/controlling-hdri-lighting-with-nodes/

And some final thanks to JDAMS for his surface material testing balls, available on BlendSwap at http://www.blendswap.com/blends/view/49448