...need some good reasons why Vue 5 and Vue 6 are much better Poser rendering software than Poser 6 or 7?

A question by **carodan **over in the RDNA forum:

"..HDRI in P7 - anyone used it to any effect yet? ...cos I'm having real difficulty setting them up. Seems to me they don't really offer much more control over lighting than using jpegs.
Maybe I'm missing something(?). Not much of use in the manual."

**bagginsbill
**"You're not missing something. Just as there are diffuse and specular effects in an infinite light or spot light or point light, there should be diffuse and specular effects in image based lighting (IBL). But as far as I know, Poser 6 and 7 only implement the diffuse part of IBL. Other apps do both. The diffuse contribution is not significantly affected by more dynamic range. So the addition of the HDR image feature was pointless as far as I can tell.

The high dynamic range is most important for reflections. Consider a poorly polished sphere, with a reflectivity of .01. Its noticeable reflections are only going to be of hot spots, truly bright regions of the sky. Consider a spot in the sky that at a normal exposure produces a numerical brightness value of 200. The reflection of that in the sphere is only going to be 2. If your IBL image can only go to 255, then the specular reflection only goes to 2.55, which is hardly noticeable. But if there is a hot spot, say near or at the sun itself, then the numerical value should be like 15000, and the reflection would be 150, which is very noticeable. Given an exposure setting that accurately records the ground-based scenery, the sky goes way over 255 and just doesn't get recorded. So HDR images were invented to record this extra info that we see in reflections, but do not see directly, because in a photo or CG image there's nothing whiter than white, if you know what I mean.

A high dynamic range image can record all of it. But it's not relevant if you don't calculate specular reflections from that image, because that's where the hot spot matters. It effects the diffuse too, somewhat, but far less.

So don't waste your time. I don't know why EF even bothered with the HDRI feature if they weren't going to do specular IBL. "