Err, I mean y into the (x,z) matrix of course, lol... It's late...

@Angelouscuitry: Thanks for the detailed tutorial picture! :D
Now I know what your intention is. g
From what you said, I did it right without using IBL ans without artifacts.
Have not used the Poser ball tho. The only setting on the ball except for the math nodes was "forward normals". No groups changed or whatsoever.

More IBL's to have more brightness? that would cost more resources and you still have no good shadows. IBL + shadow casting on 1 light doesn't work very well.
You would make 1 IBL and 1 light that lights the scene and is responsible for shadows. The IBL only gives some tints to the lighitng but it doesn't do the main lighting part. It's set to a low value.

Miss Nancy asked "am I correct in assuming that, in the absence of any other light source,
the P7 IBL light doesn't allow materials to exhibit optical properties
such as reflection, refraction, transparency, shadows, et al.?"

No that is incorrect. The only thing you lose with IBL is specular reflections, i.e. simulation (using specular nodes) of the almost direct reflection of a light source on a surface. Why? I can find no reason, other than they were lazy, or they don't know much about computer graphics past 1990. I say this with some safety because I have implement soft and hard specular effects in shaders using images and the sphere_map node. The sphere_map node and the built-in IBL diffuse illumination are almost exactly the same thing. But I digress.

Ordinary object-to-object reflections are not affected by the types of lights you use and in fact lights are not needed at all to get reflections. You may ask then what could possibly be seen then? The answer is anything you include in the scene that lights itself, i.e. uses ambient or alt-diffuse or alt-specular to force a color into the render even without light.

Attached Link: Not your average IBL image

Also Olivier (and many other people) are wrong about IBL and shadows. (He knows better now.) An IBL *can* produce directional shadows just fine. I don't know why people just believe this stuff, instead of trying it. I read that a long time ago, and said to myself "Let me see if that is true - I will enable shadows on my IBL - oh look - shadows."

Follow the link - you'll see and image lit ONLY by IBL, that has no AO in it - directional shadows were used.

I should write a book. There are so many ways people misuse Poser and get it to do stupid ugly things, and also so many things people believe are limitations when they are not at all.

Is there some reason you can't use the Sky Dome under the RuntimeDNA FOlder in your Poser 6 Characters folder? It's the LE version of their MicroCosm SkyDome from what I've heard. I didn't even know I had it til just recently when reading over in the Node Cult at RDNA about it.

Ay,

I'll try to help in more detail tomorrow. I see once again that I'm not taken literally. Really, when I tell you to do certain things, and you don't do them, you will not get what I'm describing.

First yes the mirror ball must be teeny tiny, or you will get perspective distortion.

Second, you must use the front camera like I said. Zeroing the Main camera will line it up, but you're still getting perspective in the mirror. You can't have that - we need to produce what is called an Angular Map and the only way to do that is with an Orthographic camera, which the Front camera is - orthographic. I can't type any more on that. Just do what I say, always. I never tell you something for no reason. If the camera didn't matter, I would have said "line up your camera".

Third, you did not get glowing sky because you probably are still not doing what I said - plug your colors into Alt Diffuse - make it glow. No lights. I'll say more tomorrow.

Attached Link: HDRI IBL in Poser using LDRI with Nodes

Of course you can use the MicroCosm SkyDome - that's what it is for. However, I'm not crazy about how that was UV mapped. I don't remember why, I just remember that I could not get the results I wanted as easily as with a sphere. 

If you read my article on Not your average IBL image, you'll see I did some wacky stuff with spheres.

Also, the article linked here is pretty cool. It covers more on making an environment sphere and IBL that both light your scene and provides the 360 degree background.

Attached Link: Infinite Lights Global Illumination Scenes(289K)

I found shadows!  Without the beneift of a Raytraced Mirrored Ball, I've never had the oppurtunity to balance my Global Illumination models so well.  The Infinite lightset I was using was lopsided, there was'nt near as much light in the rear, so the shadow must have gotten bounced around.  Evening the distribution of lights has helped alot!

When I map this sphere with texture it is obvious where the props UV seem needs work, could this Window Panes Artifact be that?  In these images I've got the Cloud node applied, not a texture.  The really strange part is the seem just is'nt in that same place(for the cloud node) as it was so evident(for the texture map?)

"...sky because you probably are still not doing what I said - plug your colors into Alt Diffuse - make it glow. No lights. I'll say more tomorrow."

Oh, for the Sky!  I'm sorry bagginsbill, I'll definately pay closer attention to detail, in the future!

...back over to IBL!

Hi Angelouscuitry

The files are on their way.

Cheers,
Patorak

I've got two domes in the scene; the inner is a transparent Cloud Dome, and the other is just a Dissue color.  

The Cloud Dome loast it's saturation, when I moved the Cloud node, from Diffuse?

I think I can activate the Sky Dome Alternate Diffuse with a Color node around, but did'nt see where to ceate it?

the one on the left looks o.k., anyway. but ya could also use a sky photo. ISTR bill said one can use one dome with clouds only, the other with solid colour. then, the way I understand it, the skydome(s) should have "cast shadows" unchecked. personally i would keep it simple, and just use one skydome. p.s. I found out that, when illuminating a scene with only an IBL, if an object with a reflection channel has reflection_lite_mult checked, this prevents said object from reflecting anything. but if reflection_lite_mult is unchecked, then the object reflects everything normally. however, if it's a spotlite or infinite lite (and no IBL), then the object will reflect everything whether or not reflection_lite_mult is checked.

Reflection_lite_mult is bad - it multiples the reflections with the amount of light hitting the object. I have talked about this several times recently, in every posting on reflections. Turn it and the other stupid one Reflect_Kd_Mult off. Always.

Think about this: Imagine a deep whole in a wall, long like you could stick your arm all the way in and it still doesn't reach the back. Now visualize a mirror in the back of this hole. You stand with your face just outside the hole and your face is well lit, but everything inside the hole is almost completely dark.

Should the reflection of your face in the mirror be normal or dark?

The answer is normal. The amount of light hitting the mirror is completely irrelevent when calculating how bright your reflection should be. And yet, that is what Reflect_Lite_Mult does. It Multitplies your Reflection with the amount of lite reaching the mirror. That's stupid.

And you said "if it's a spotlite or infinite lite (and no IBL), then the object will reflect everything whether or not reflection_lite_mult is checked." What you actually experienced was that with a strong light shining on the mirror, multiplied with the reflection, it looked ok. If you had reduced the brightness of your infinite or spot light, you would have found that the reflection actually is being affected. It's just that when the light strength (k) is close to 1, you don't notice k * reflection is the same as reflection. But with k closer to 0, you certainly would notice that k * reflection is nearly zero.

o.k., thanks, bill, for that. It's apparently the same with using diffuse colours on objects. multiplying an object's colour by white (1) gives the unmodified colour, but multplying an object's colour by black (0) can only give black as a result. it may just be a bug in my version of P7, but the glass/mirror ball material sets Reflect_Lite_Mult at 1, whereas the metal/chrome material sets Reflect_Lite_Mult at 0, hence the only one that works for me, unmodified (with IBL alone) is the latter.

aah so that would stop the additive mirror effect I take it? (setting up an 'infinity' tunnel (2 mirrors refelcting each other) in a lot of renderers causes the reflections to go white instead of black as each reflection is added to the next amplifying it instead of loosing energy and darkening)

yeah, I sometimes get white mirrors in P7, but I click some setting and it goes away. not certain which setting. anyway, the above image is a render using sixus' scrum and bill's skydome method. the skydome is the P7 hi-res ball scaled to 100000%, with the cloud node attached to the diffuse colour. scrum is holding an hi-res ball with the reflect node, which is reflecting the skydome, scrum, and the floor. the main light is IBL/AO, using the cloud node as the image source, in place of a light probe or hdri. there is a dim inf-lite in upper left front for fill (no shadows). the IBL renders alot faster with ray-traced or depth-mapped shadows, but I eschewed them in favour of AO.

Patorak's Sphere model has really shown a lot of potential!  I was really excited to see this fist render(upper left.)

Somehow, when I change my Main Camera's yOrbit from 0 to 90, the mapping show stress/stretch marks (upper right.)

I ran the .OBJ, through UVMapper.  Here(lower) is an image of the UV Map.  It too looked good to me also, I wanted it for use with 2:1 images and this looks like just that. 

Any ideas?

The really releaving news is that this sphere prop works fine with the cloud node(a Procedural Shader?)  There does'nt seem to be anything, like window panes, kicking around in the Raytracing!

*"Cute! gg"
*Thanks, Zarat!

Smiley Xtra 4.1.1 is a Free Firefox Add-On.  It's got at least a couple thousand of those little guys, with a URL to each!  You just have to figure out how to use the Preview that shows 100, or so, at a time!

Here is the scene I created with Patorak's Sphere prop!  Just end whatever you name the DL to end in .ZIP, before you save it to your computer.

Is there a Mapper in the house?  I can see why miss Nancy suggested we do try to use Texture Maps.  This is definately an area I'd hoped we would cover with this thread.

Meanwhile, has anyone found a substitute for the Clouds node?

ya wouldn't just use a photo of clouds. it would be a fisheye photo of a cloudy sky, the horizon, and all the objects visible to the camera. my suggestion would be to see if somebody did a lightprobe photo by standing directly above a reflecting mirror ball when they took the photo. none of the light probes in the P7/runtime/textures/P6 folder have good cloud shots IMVHO. they mostly seem to have the photographer squatting about 1 metre to the side of the reflecting ball. dosch has some good sky shots (hdri) and they're gonna cost $$$, but at least they cloned out the photographer. :lol:

Vue has an File > Export Sky function that will export a 360 panorama, specifically for mapping onto a sphere!  Attached is an example.

Similarly Bryce has a 360 Panorama render option.

Photographically there is an applicatin to help turn about 8 photos into a similar map, but I need to find it again, it's been years since I'd seen it.

A big part of why I started this thread, was just in case we got stuck with a Poser Specific problem, like this mapping err, that patorak and are have experienced!   I think I can prove this has happened, with this Bryce 5 animation.

I see Vue can also export Sphere objects!  When this Vue's Sphere prop is imported into Bryce 5, and textured with one of Vue's Sky Export Texture Maps, everything is hunky dorry!  This leeds me to believe that the actual Prop and Texture Map are exported fine; and that the err is some kind of Texuring Preferene that Poser is'nt engaging?

FYI - I used Bryce's default Parametric mapping style.  I thought I'd need it's Spherical, but did'nt.