Reflection map, how to apply to a Blinn

[s-b]

I have made an animation of an aircraft on a backplate(s) of an airport runway. I previously took photos of the area (360 degres) to be used for reflction maps. If i blend these images into a panorama how do I apply it the Blinn material to show off the reflections.

Do I need to make an HDRI / HDR map or can I get away with a panoramic image ?

It doesn't have to be ultra high quality as the aircraft is 1/3 of the shot, I just need to show moving reflections. Does the image have to be plugged into the reflection colour node and thats it or do i need to set up a sphere arounds the aircraft or something like that ?

What is the best way of doing this,
maybe I can stich the photos together and apply them to a plane, then the aircraft with receive the reflections ?

[joojaa]

I have made an animation of an aircraft on a backplate(s) of
an airport runway. I previously took photos of the area (360 degres) to
be used for reflction maps. If i blend these images into a panorama how
do I apply it the Blinn material to show off the reflections.

Put it on a sphere (or whatever the shape of your projection is) that surrounds your world. Or plug a env sphere into the reflected color slot and pluug your map there. Or if yoru using mentalray make a global environment shader with the ibl option.

Do I need to make an HDRI / HDR map or can I get away with a panoramic
image ?

Its probably too late by now to make a change* but yes you should. because normal 8 bit images dont have the range to convey real refelctive sense. You can however try to make it look a bit like this by pumping color gain up over 1 1 1 and then tone down the normal color area.

It is tough juts a wee bit problematic as the auto balancing your camera uses does throw the coloration of the images off considerably so you really dont have that data so you would need to manually mask the sky to be brighter etc.

*It si NOT enough just to take the raw or jpeg image and save it as HDR. This doesn't make the high dynamic part true just the same data format. You still need multiple exposures for each image to get the HD part. Its maybe a bit better but not much. Data does not magically appear just because yoru format changes.