And for comparison, this is what we USED to have to do to get a decent faked HDRI scene in earlier version of bryce: "The best material to apply to the hdr hollow ball is both dots in the first ambient and diffuse channels. Then add a dot for ambience (the one in the middle of the window, not the one at the top.) Now leave the diffusion dot blank but move the slider to 100. Now go to the pulldown near the first component window and disable cast shadows and recieve shadows. This will make the image appear bright, but also be affected by lights you add to the scene. diffuse--dot ambient--dot 100--diffusion-no dot ambience--dot A faster way of faking illumination by the sphere using no lights and no true ambience is blurry reflections (which actually render quite fast without shadows) To do this, make all the materials besides the hdr spere 30 diffuse and 70 reflective, or some combination of the two that add to 100. (more diffuse and less reflection=brighter colors and less illumination effect. For mirrored objects, leave reflection high and diffusion very low or zero, e.g. a mirrored sphere. Leave glass objects the way they are, don't add diffuse or reflection values) Always leave ambience at zero. Now here's the trick. Edit the whitness of the specular halo valo in each objects material to give more blurring or less blurring. More white=more blurring and less white=less blurring. Objects with a black specular halo will not be blurred at all. For most mirrored objects, however, a setting as high as RGB 40 40 40 is acceptable. Don't worry if you lose the specular highlights for the reflection, as these will be replaced by the more natural lighting captured on the hdr image. For matte objects (non-reflective objects), make the specular halo rgb 254 254 254 and make reflection 30 or lower. Boost the metallicity all the way up and reduce specdularity until it is no longer blown out. Add one light to the scene and disable shadows. Place it behind the camera so that it is illuminating the scene from the front. Enable blurry reflections at 16rpp to test render and render at 64 rpp. Enjoy!"