Pantherin75 posted at 5:40 PM Sat, 11 January 2025 - #4492770

Thanks.

In most cases, I was never really happy because the HDRI method always proved too bright and awful for any scene where I would want to use Emissive textures. For example, if you check out Polyhaven and the nighttime HDRI, you'll find most are not really nighttime but actually look like dawn-light.

HDRI's are not created equally, just as you discovered. The lighting levels can be drastically different in HDRI's, and that is what the spec is for to begin with. Sadly the background node in Poser is about as basic as it gets, and has no way of dealing with the differences in HDRI light levels.

Technically there is a highly configurable dome in Poser, but there is literally no way to display it properly in the preview. That doesn't mean that it isn't useful, but it does have some limitations.

I personally don't use an additional dome in Poser, and find it counter productive to add another one that does far less, most with less options... My default scene presently uses this shader, which Ironically can do more than Poser even supports doing with it... IE, some if it doesn't work in Poser, but does in Blender.... 

Translation and perspective of the dome being one of the things Poser doesn't support. Which are minor issues to deal with.

Here is a very useful background shader for using HDRI. I have it all spread out so you can see how to make it, and the user node to change settings are highlighted...

It can do some things that are very useful, change gamma, adjust the lighting without affecting the background, adjust the background without affecting the lighting, etc. It can also blur the background, and most setups simply can not do that. This one blurs the light and the background at the same time, but if you are duplicate the blur section and do it on either side of the light path split independently, or just the background, or both. This is a fairly basic setup, and you can get even more creative with the vertex math if you want to.. It isn't perfect, but can get stunning results with basically any hdri.. Some of the night time ones take some experimenting with to get to render properly, and that has more to do with the limited layers in the HDRI than Poser.

This is the number one reason I highly recommend learning these nodes... You do not have to be an expert at it to do amazing things.

The nodes that come pre canned in Poser have specific usages, but are basically useless for a lot of other things....

If you want to use a dome, this shader can be configured to work with a dome as well. 

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