Well it doesn't matter that there's a car in it. I could put my face in it and you'd not notice it. The details don't matter. It's the broad swaths of color and luminance that matters. This image controls diffuse reflection only, so that means that hundreds of points contribute to the illumination from any given direction. Effectively, the image is blurred beyond all recognition of details like tree branches or cars or street signs.

What does matter is that whoever made that doesn't understand the angular map format. First of all, a mirror ball is not the right format. A mirror ball, unless shot from infinitly far away, doesn't include much information from behind the ball.

Second, it was shot while looking down. As a result, a good part of that image showing the sky is actually being used to illuminate the subject from underneath and in front of the figure. Imagine I took a big light and put it in front of you on the ground and shined it up into your face. Equivalent to all the light that is just above the car. That's what is happening here.

The third thing that's wrong with it is it is a normally colored photo. Which means the color information is recorded to look like real life when viewed on your computer screen. This is the sRGB color space, and it inflates illumination intensities. A properly made IBL light probe is encoded not in sRGB color space, but linear color space. What this means is that the information Poser gets from this image is not only positioned incorrectly, but grossly over bright.

You won't get any decent contouring from such an image. It's basically the equivalent of several hundreds really bright light bulbs arrayed in front of and under your subject.

Throw that away.

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Renderosity forum reply notifications are wonky. If I read a follow-up in a thread, but I don't myself reply, then notifications no longer happen AT ALL on that thread. So if I seem to be ignoring a question, that's why. (Updated September 23, 2019)