> Quote - If you are using a lightdome such as the one in I13's IDL studio could that count as an environment to bounce the light back for the refractions so as to get the same effects... etc.

Yes you could use that or my environment sphere - same idea - a giant sphere or dome that holds an image of the world around the subject. But!

Want to use nothing? Ah! Ok forget light domes - forget anything else. To make an isolated object as if there is a world around it, do as I did here.

Go into the shader. On the Reflect and Refract nodes there is a Background input. Change that to white. Now you will need three nodes (middle is optional, but do it)

1. Add a Sphere_Map node. Connect that to both Reflect and Refract Background input.

2. Add an HSV node. This is optional, but it is nice for adjusting the color and brightness of the world image.

3. Add an Image_Map node and load your world image into it.

My image is a very very blue sky and I wanted to both boost its brightness and decrease the saturation. I was easily able to do those two things with the HSV node. Notice I set the Saturation to 0.25 and the Value to 2.0? That is a fantastic tool for image adjustments.

Now I can render with nothing else in the scene. I still want raytracing for the gem to pick up internal bounces and so on, but I don't need any other objects. The Sphere_Map + Image_Map will supply the rest.

In render settings, make sure! you choose Render Over Black in the options box.

Save as PNG.

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