HDRI is great in Vue. The only way to get excellent quality is to buy your images or beg steal or borrow a good SLR camera rig and make your own. First thing is to get HDRShop and read the tut's. The images take some effort but they are not realy that hard to do. HDR is growing by leaps and bounds, including HDR monitors on the horizon and Photo Shop support for the images. With HDRShop you can allso do panoramic renders in Vue with a range of different lighting settings and create HDR images from them. Get ready for HUGE render times though.