Let me help you using IDL, too many people use this feature without knowing how it work ...

(Please dont answer)

For this, the better is the envsphere from BB, you can find more infos here

http://sites.google.com/site/bagginsbill/free-stuff/environment-sphere

Specular on material is only for reflecting light source, they are invisible without ...

As you can see the lights come from the top, and only from the top !

Now we have te blur the shadow, for this scene i think the maximum 20 is good ( we can't put more )

Light

RT shadow
B 20
S 80
MB 0.2

Render settings

B = 2
IC = 0
ILQ = 75
PS 6
MSR 0.2

I hope this help you !

Now you can aswer ;-)

IDL in poser is light bouncing. its a way to simulate how lighting works in real life. light bounces around in the real world. plus IDL in poser is also able to use every texture and geometry as a lightsource. so if we have a box in our scene and the ambient is set to white then it will light our scene.

if people dont understand this with 100 articles on google then they shouldnt use it. i know i sound mean but  there is enough info on this forum and on google. i doesnt get any easier then this. its  light bouncing aroud. if we have at home a white wall then lets put our hand next to the wall. we will see a very small orange tint. its light bouncing from our skin on the wall.

IDL means indirect lighting.

Poser, vray, mentalray, blender, c4d, all have this feature, know as IDL or GI ... I post this cause many people use this feature with light set from store or freebee, they arent the most realistic !

IDL work like reflection, if you have nothing to reflect you scene look empty ...

I never see something in the world without an environment ...

 Thank you for posting this ;)

Quote - Poser, vray, mentalray, blender, c4d, all have this feature, know as IDL or GI ... I post this cause many people use this feature with light set from store or freebee, they arent the most realistic !

IDL work like reflection, if you have nothing to reflect you scene look empty ...

I never see something in the world without an environment ...

even if you have no environment there still will be light bouncing.

 I don't think that's what anthansius is saying, ice-boy.  she said it would look empty, not that it wouldn't work.  

I, for one, appreciate any info on IDL being shared, that way more people will learn to use it.

Thanks for sharing, I have a better understanding of IDL! :)

Thank you. 

Thank you, that's very enlightening. (if you pardon the pun)

You say you use an infinite light, then mention point light. Since both are different lights in Poser, could you clarify which one you mean?

I believe she meant an infinite light to illuminate the top of the object (R2D2 in this instance).  Generally, the direction from which the light is coming from. 

Yeah, that's what I'm thinking. :)
Just making sure I get what she's trying to say, is all, since point lights are very different from Infinite -- and in general don't have shadows enabled.

Hence I'm trying to clarify.

Quote - I believe she meant an infinite light to illuminate the top of the object (R2D2 in this instance).  Generally, the direction from which the light is coming from. 

I agree, but for this exemple is there too mani light to found the better direction of the inf light

Quote - The same scene with final render ... dont forget the env emit light, for that i put the emit at 50 % and the light at 50 %

Light

RT shadow
B 20
S 80
MB 0.2

Render settings

B = 2
IC = 0
ILQ = 75
PS 6
MSR 0.2

Okay, another question. :)

The light is obvious.

Shadow Blur Radius: 20
Shadow Samples: 80
Shadow Min Bias: 0.2

The second, I'm guessing is the main render window, not Dimension3D's excellent render window.

Raytrace Bounces: 2
Irradiance Caching: 0 (?)
Indirect Light Quality: 75
Pixel Samples: 6
Min Shading Rate: 0.2

Just in case. :)

Now, you say you put the emit to 50% light at 50% -- I'm not sure where you set the emit?

Silke, for the light it'in the panel where you define the color the xyz position etc etc ...

For the envsphere, if you use the BB shader by defaut, see the altdiff it is white, white = 100% black = 0% ... 50 % = ? mid grey so 127,127,127 !

I set these settings for this scene, for another scene the settings may be differents !

I post somes other exemples later, poser is rendering since 3h am
 

For this example i use trocadero ( staying french :-) ) pluged in the ambiant_color, you can use the default settings of the envsphere, but i prefer using it, and the mini from p8 ... Dint forget to delete all the lights !

In the first render we have the ambiant light only ...

Switch to the auxcam and put it at x,y,z 0,0,0 and rotation 0,0,0 too ...

I set a large angle for more precision, like 15 mn, for a little help you can use the focus distance guide like the picture.

Look for the sun with the y and x orbit only, it's enough

The x orbit of the camera will be the negative for the light, here we have 26 for the camera, set -26 for the xrotate of the light ...

For the xrotate of the light add 180+the yorbit of the camera, here 180+113 so 293.

As you can see is there more realistic, but is there some artifacts on the ground behind the wheels ...

For this image i set the intensity of the envsphere to 0.8 and the light to 0.8 and some fresnel reflection refraction ... dont forget to add more bounce of raytracing when you have reflection/refraction, minimum 3 ...

Be carreful, a great render may take some hours of render, for theses examples i use a medium quality .

Next the interior lightning
 

The 4 color balls have the AMBIENT at 40.
NO other lights are used.
The middle ball, the roof, walls, floor have a Reflect in the Diffuse and the Reflection

The full series can be seen in the post about the P8 Glowing Effect, but here is the result :(click)
Cast shadows ON
Raytrace ON
Bounces 2
IC 10
IQ 50
Px 3
MSR 0.5

Why reflection in diffuse and reflect ?

Included a small test
Left Ball    White reflect in duffuse gives just a reflected shadow
Middle ball White reflect in diffuse and in reflection gives a mirror of Aly
Right Ball White reflect in reflection gives ? not a lot actually

I put my reflection at 80% of time in the alt_diff, i think putting it in both diff and reflect use more resources !

My 3 balls have the same settings and look more realistic than your picture

Blue = alt_diff
White = alt_spec
green = reflect

Same result

there is a bug with reflection and IDL. BB reported it to SM. we will have to whait.

Modulating reflections with the diffuse light node makes no sense at all to me, at least in real world terms. (That's why we should never use Reflect_Lite_Mult in the PoserSurface node, which effectively does the same thing to reflections).

Personally, I would avoid it for that reason alone.

i am still asking myself why is the reflect_lite_mult still  inside

It's for the reflection map not real reflection ...

Bellow the sphere with an environment map no reflect shader and all mult unchecked

Aha... so those two multipliers must operate on the Reflection channels themselves, no matter what you have plugged in to them.

I never use reflection maps, so I never understood what those multipliers were for. Now all is explained, thanks!

I've said an error, it work with the reflect too, not only with a reflection map !

Reflect_Lite_Mult and Reflect_Kd_Mult make no sense, period, regardless of whether the reflections are fake (with a Sphere_Map) or real.

Consider - a scene with no lights, just two balls. One is glowing, the other is a mirror ball. With Reflect_Lite_Mult on the mirror ball, what color is it? Answer: Black.

Thanks for posting Anthanasius, your explanations were not at all nerdlike and your idl images were very nice.

Quote - ... make no sense...

Well, actually the original concept now makes sense to me. It was an easy way of making reflection maps (which would otherwise be uniformly self-lit) dependent on scene lighting in a somewhat reasonable way. I agree it makes no sense to do things this way nowadays.

Of course it won't work in bb's example scene; there is no diffuse light in the scene, so the reflection map is always multiplied by zero. But in reality an object that is visible (glowing) with no external lighting must itself be a light source, and with that light source correctly modeled in the scene the 'reflecting' ball would not be black.