That seems too dark to me though, and the light meter seems to agree?

If I understood everything BB posted above, then the "Value" entry on the HSV node should control brightness. I know it will control the brightness of the image, but will that make more light in the scene? Let's find out!

I turned the "Value" setting on the HSV node up to 2.0, which is double what it was:

Material room:

Round 2! Fight!! :P

Ok, so here we go again after BB's many corrections to what I was doing wrong. So first I removed the EnvSphere. Then I re-added it and re-attached the HDRI image to the Panoramic Node. I did that to make sure I didn't mess anything else up. I made sure "Gama In" was 1.0, as I'm using a HDRI image. I made sure "Gamma Out" was 1.0, as I have GC turned on and set to 2.2 in my render settings.

This is the result:

Material Room:

Plus... distracted by forums, the web, and Carrara video tutorials. When's dinner? What's on Netflix? Gotta Pose A4... oh yeah, group R6_b. Lol.

LMAO!

Oh yeah how bout this, grouping 6 tentacles atm... over 100 bones. Polygons shmolygons. ;)

I didn't know you hated yourself that much. :P

Who was she and where did you find her? :)

Hey BagginsBill,

First, I just want to thank you enthusiastically once more for everything that you do. All of your technical discussions that go way over my head, but are still really interesting to read. Your generosity with many of the shaders, tips, and tricks you've given us over the years. And just generally for being you! :D

You're right, I should have read through the instructions in detail once more. I read them a long time ago when I originally downloaded your sphere, and then went looking for the "lightless" thread last week when I was thinking about trying this. Re-reading that thread (thank you again for helping me track it down), and reading a bunch of your other posts over the last week was very educational.

However, as you yourself have pointed out, some of your older posts were made before your latest discoveries. If you read a whole bunch of stuff from you, all from different time periods, in a short pan of time, then it can get confusing to an amateur like me as it appears that you are contradicting yourself on occasion. That is not a criticism in any way directed at you, just an observation and advice for any one that does what I did - if you choose to go read a bunch of stuff from BB, then pay attention to the dates and times so that you have an understanding of how his techniques have evolved and the correct way to implement them in a modern Poser environment.

I failed to do that. Sorry! And thank you for pointing it out. :)

Son of a... I didn't even SEE that link at the bottom of the EnvSphere page with step-by-step instructions.

I understand what you are saying about GC though, and I do turn on GC in my render settings. So I need to adjust that Gamma In setting from 2.2 to 1.0. Thank you for pointing that out. I am not sure I understand what you are saying about the HSV node, but let's leave that for now - I'm at work so I can't play with it at the moment. I'll re-read this later on, along with the instructions on your page, and do some more experiments this evening. :)

And this is why I decided to post this series of images. LOL!

This is awesome feedback! Thank all of you so much!!

@Englishbob - Poser Pro 2014 Game Dev. Sorry! I really should have included that. :)

@Teyon - Whoops! I don't even think about the ground plane, as it's "always there" (unless you remove it). But you are correct! the ground plane was resized so that the floor from the HDRI image would not be visible from this particular camera angle. Other angles will still show the floor that is present in the HDRI image, and the ground plane would need to be resized again. The ground plane had BBTile applied to it from EZMat.

@primorge - Good eye! I can't really tell that stuff at a glance yet. I thought it looked good. :P

Well holy cow! Maybe all that reading of threads by BagginsBill didn't go to waste. :D

Sweet! Dang, maybe I actually figured something out!! LOL

Well let's try adding some shadows with an infinite light. I turned the Ambient back down to 1 and added a single Infinite light at 90%.

Much better!

After this I played around with the Ambient Value, and ended up cranking it up to 2.

Still not right. In fact, it looks exactly the same as the previous render. Except the ambient is 10x the previous render.

Oh! BB said to plug the Panaramic image into the Ambient Node. I guess I just assumed that was already done. Let's try plugging that in properly then, and changing the Ambient Color to white.

That looks better!

But BB's light meter says it's still not right. The Ambient is set to 1. Maybe I need to crank up the brightness some... Let's try Ambient at 10:

Well that doesn't look right! Hmmm...

Oh! Duh!! Hahahahah, I didn't turn on ray tracing and indirect lights in the render settings...

I loaded Poser, and then added the aforementioned Props. Then I plugged the HDRI image into BB's EnvSphere. You can see the resulting render and the material room setup in the attached images.

No lights. (Mostly) There is one small spotlight. Can you find it?

 

I'm guessing it's attached to the actual spot light prop, second from the left?