Its not true radiosity but using True ambience with a sphere, you can simulate the image based lighting of other more expensive programs. In this image the skull is untextured and there is only 1 light in it. Griggs

Wow Griggs. That is cool! Nice. Pleiades

Any chance you could tell me where you got that skull, it looks very good!

I was quite surprised it came out as well as it did. The skull came from The lightwave disk, yet to find one as detailed.

Yeah, the skulls I've been able to come across don't look near as realistic as that. Ah, oh well don't think I'll be owning that anytime soon! :)

Could you explain your method in a little more detail? I really like your results.

Unfortunately (with the demo) using an object (such as a sphere) with ambience to cast light ends with imported Poser obj figures losing their smoothing. I can achieve lovely lighting, but the object itself becomes a mess. So close, yet so far.

OK - I bow to the master ... ::bow bow bow:: How'd ya do it? I can't get it to work, so clearly I am missing something obvious.... TomD

Thats odd PJF. I have tried 4 different formats all of them seem ok with this setup, perhaps its a demo thing. This is how it was done. You put your subject, the camera and a point light into the sphere. At this point I turned off the atmosphere and the sun. Set the point light to squared falloff make it pretty bright but don't put it too close to the subject. Add a picture texture to the sphere in both the diffuse and ambient channels. Set both channels to 100% Turn on True ambience your small preview window will be pretty dark but the image will render fine with True ambience on. To make the image more photographic used depth of field and choose pretty realistic looking textures. You must enable premium settings to get true ambience to work. I also used softshadows (which helps also). Playing with the diffuse and ambient setting with all textures is a must. In all the objects I used the same texture for both channels. The setting for the poser figure in the other thread was 84.7 diffuse 23.4 ambient. The setting for the skull 47% diffuse and 34% ambient. A setting of 16 in the rays per pixel gives you a good preview though a noisy render. a setting of 64 seems to give very good results without excessive slowness. Settings of 144 and 256 are pretty much identical with higher accuracy then 64 but slower rendering. In this picture only the background texture was changed all lighting and materials were left untouched. Griggs ps using True ambience in interior scenes works pretty sweet too. Griggs again

I memory serves me i got this fairly detailed skull from the free downloads section at turbosquid .com