Environment Sphere

On Saturday, I filmed a short little piece with my friend, (same co-director as Pixelmation), and we're going to try to add some fun special effects. I have no idea how well this will turn out, but it's an opportunity for me to learn some Photoshop, After Effects, Mudbox and Maya.

Won't give away any plot yet, but in order to create reflections off shiny CG elements, it's necessary to have an environment for them to reflect. So what we did is took a bunch of photos around his backyard and I stitched them together (with much warping and messy photo editing) to create this.

Then I created a sphere in maya, turned it inside out, and applied this as a texture:

What you're looking at is the inside of this sphere (the outside is transparent...) which will provide the environment that will be seen in the reflections of the CG swords. ...oops, did I say that? Didn't mean to.

Thanks for reading and looking,
Stuart