Creating the background

Took me a while to figure out the best way of rendering out a mid ground / background for our scene. I took the main file with the houses where they will be placed in the final animation, duplicated the ground as a placeholder for where they were initially and placed a camera roughly where the camera in the main scene will be. I locked the camera down other than the rotate y so that I could spin it around 360 degrees. The file was quite laggy and so it took me awhile to get it to cooperate, but I either duplicated certain houses and kbjects in the scene or moved them around so that from the camera the mid ground looked fairly full. I had to set up each render separately rather than get it all placed in one go because the scene didn't seem to like too many copies. I made sure to overlap the camera slightly each time and set keys so that I could keep track of this. I created the lights how they'll be in the intial part of the scene and set up all the shaders and textures. I had some troubles with this as there was already some shaders applied when it was passed to me and it caused errors somehow. When the rendered out I then stitched them together in Photoshop as a cylindrical map and then in the final scene I will create a nurbs cylinder that matches the height of the panoramic and apply the projection by merely applying it as a texture to the shader. There will then be a dome over the whole scene with the sky texture on it.