Here is what I have been tinkering with for two weeks now. This image is a Firefly render with no post work. The lighting comes from stewers Python script that reads Lightgen output files from HDRShop.

I at first used available HDRI lightprobe images for testing. However for this image I created my own lightprobe right in Poser5. Since it can do raytraced reflections, I figured why not? While not at all a true HDRI image, the Lightgen plugin still worked very well for pulling the lightset from the image.

The probe was in a scene with 3 lights. I used Lightgen to create 20 lights to replicate the original 3. This is possible due to the gradients created during the raytrace.
I then used LightPanel to set all of the lights shadow maps down to 64. Since the only imagemap is the background, Poser5 rendered this in less than a minute. All other materials are material nodes tweaked out.

Needless to say, there were about 50 renderings before this one.