Not at this time, but we're told that it runs under some of the PC emulators.
Yes, if you are using HDR Shop (version 1 or version 2) for commercial use. Commercial use includes preparing or processing elements used in the creation of commercial film and video projects, or creating datasets which will be made available for sale directly. The free license agreement on the HDR Shop v1 download page is restricted to academic and non-commercial use.
The licensing web page can be found here.
All these features are supported in the latest version, called HDRShop 2.0 This is a major update of the software. A list of features is available here Also if a given feature you want is not supported post it on the message board. HDRShop 2.0 also features a much more flexible plug-in architecture allowing you to add your own features.
HDR Shop 2.0 is available under a commercial license or an academic license. The licensing web page can be found here.
Dube juggling equipment offers hollow mirrored spheres in several sizes between 2 and 3 inches in diameter. They're light and shinier, but sometimes not perfectly spherical.
Some of our research has made use of ball bearings from:
King Bearing, Inc., a subsidiary of Applied Industrial Technologies
Has many locations nationally, check www.superpages.com for one near you.
You may also find ball bearings in the McMaster-Carr catalog.
The shiniest seem to be the 2-inch chrome balls, which are less than $20 each. This is the type used for Fiat Lux and for most of the Image-Based Lighting paper. For Rendering with Natural Light and the Grace Cathedral Light Probes, we used a 3-inch ball.
Large Gazing Balls, made of glass and plated on the inside with a mirror-like material, can be ordered from Baker's Lawn Ornaments. They are available in 6, 10, and 12-inch diameters. They are not optically perfect, as their surfaces are somewhat rippled and the front surface of the glass will produce a faint secondary reflection.
Yes - mirrored spheres are never 100% specular, and you should compute and adjust for the percent reflectivity of any sphere used for measuring incident illumination. This can be done by placing the sphere near white or gray diffuse surface in such a way that that the surface is visible directly and is also visible as a reflection in the sphere. Photograph this with a camera for which a response curve is available, and then divide the pixel value of the reflection by the pixel value of the surface to obtain the reflectivity in the red, gree, and blue channels. Then, divide the pixel values of any image taken of the sphere by these numbers to have a probe image that is calibrated with repsect to images (such as background plates) taken directly by the camera. Typical metal sphere reflectivities are in the range of fifty to sixty percent.
You should take care to clean the ball of dust and grease before using, and to handle it with a white cotton glove such as those sold at photography stores to handle photographic negatives. If a ball bearing gets wet, it will rust, so make sure not to leave it outside overnight.