Yep, now's the time to get cheap Christmas baubles, and the cheap metallic balls, especially the reflective ones that are almost like polished metal, and use thm to make light-probe images. Go look at the Poser images, in Runtime/textures/Poser 8 Textures/LightProbes, and look at the middle of duskByOcean.jpg or jungleShadeBrightDay.jpg . Yep, that's the photographer in the middle of the image. And you don't even have to mount your mirror ball on a stick. Practically, you want to use the longest focal length you can with your digital camera. And since these images with Poser are around 700 pixels square, we can get away with only having the sphere being a small part of the camera image--we're only using half a megapixel. So, of you go, grab your balls, and have fun... :}

I'm a jalapeño... onna steek

Sorry, couldn't resist. That's a good suggestion... I've used the mirror balls used in gardens before, those work well too.

"Poser 8 Textures"? is this a sneak preview of the new software? no, just kidding. for those things, there's software available to clone out the photographer (same goes for those taking photos of eyes), but it lends a certain air of authenticity if the photographer is left in.

Quote - I'm a jalapeño... onna steek

Sorry, couldn't resist. That's a good suggestion... I've used the mirror balls used in gardens before, those work well too.

I prefer Walter & Ahmed myself ;)

I'm going to get some xmas decorastions & try the camera trickery thing :D

Here's a link that might be useful as well www.debevec.org/Probes/. Lighting is awesome!!!

Yes, that's one of the standard articles on the topic. The problem in Poser 6 is that the lightprobe images are ordinary JPEGs. so they cannot be HDRIs. There are ways of getting 16-bit data into Poser using two 8-bit images, but getting the HDRI image to start from is hard. You're talking about multiple digital images, shot by a camera on a solid tripod, with varying exposure settings, or a very special camera. [Brief tech note: the shader engine is working at much height precision than input texturemaps, both brightness range and the UV-resolution, and you can use scale/offset on an imagemap to get the high local resolution. But brightness, that's harder.]

I have a free set of ibl lights for p6 at sharecg if anyone is interested.
They are fun to do but its hard to get one of high quality using a reflective sphere. Some of them I did with no less than 6 exposure settings.  There are several ways to merge images into hdri but I've found cs2 to be better than hdrshop or any other software... The free version anyway.
If you are in the end saving as ldr then fdrtools is great for tonemapping.

.."an at these prices, I'm cuttin' me own throat" -Cut me own Throat Dibbler...;)