Octane Standalone Documentation

The Spherical projection is used for Environment textures and IES light distributions. It performs latitude-longitude mapping for the U and V coordinates. When used with Procedural textures, the W coordinate is the distance from the origin (Figure 1).

Figure 1: The Spherical projection used with the Checks procedural texture

When using an Image texture to light a scene with the OctaneRender® Environment node, spherical mapping combined with a Transforms node lets you rotate and translate the environment sphere's texture.

To rotate a texture image (e.g., an HDR image) around a vertical axis, switch the texture environment image's projection to Spherical and rotate it via the Y axis through the Sphere Transformation sliders.

Figure 2: Spherical projection applied to a box, cylinder, and sphere