This weekend while taking the photos for my background plates for Project 1, I was able to experiment with the 8mm fish eye lens that Professor Gaynor recently purchased, along with the pano-head rig for the tripod. This could be another alternative to creating our HDRs rather than relying on the photo of the chrome spheres. When first trying out this method I was a little worried at how well it might work because there was a strange blue halo surrounding the edge of each photo taken, as seen below.
After some trial and error, I was then able to download the free trial version on PTGui and try to stitch them together. It seems the blue halo around the lens is not actually an issue! With the free trial version it does cover your image with watermarks and you cannot export an HDR image, but other than those minor things it seems to work! The alignment isn't as exact as I would like it to be, so I think I would need to be more careful and precise when taking the photos.
Panorama image exported out of PTGui
When importing the panoramic image into Maya, I did notice that the very top and the very bottom of the HDR is black. To avoid this in the future, I think there should be a fifth photo taken with the camera pointing straight up above, and possibly another one pointing straight down below. This first experiment was taken with just four photos taken, covering the 360 degrees around. But it is now clear that at least 5 or 6 photos need to be taken to cover everything.