Hi,
I was looking for a way of getting HDRI's into Poser(Just an Afterthought after Seeing Mec's Tut), and stumbled upon this. Well, I know you guys must have thought of this...and probably seen this, but still
http://www.users.space.net.au/~phaedrus/phaedrus/radiosity2.html
My variation, 2 images, One normal, One really high contrast using normal image, combine with RAMP. LOL
May be I'm just seeing things, but looks better than with just one Image, or one image with RAMP.

Message edited on: 06/17/2005 05:08

Poser 6 don't support HDRI we just talking about... and yes you need panoramic image or lightprobe.. to get the exact position of the light.. there are not better way if you can capure the sky light and the sun then is fine. Lightwave HDRI is still mistery ...

Shade 8 has it and the new version will support P6 and hair dynamics. Just need to wait for it to get to the US so the rest of the world can get it. I still don't know why HDRI was not used in Poser6. Might be render times. Idid one in Shade that took 4 days. Blew my mind at the quality of the render but not many people have that kind of time to wait for it. Now they might add it to P7?

"Now they might add it to P7?" God, I hope not! Do you realize the kind of process-intensive light calculations that go into HDRI, or even basic global illumination? Given Poser's renderer, it would take weeks to render an image using it. Not to mention, Poser still hasn't perfected the use of point lights (or omni-directional lights) yet. In fact, they just introduced them for the first time in P6, and still haven't figured out a way to incorporate shadow-maps with them. No, I think low dynamic range IBL and AO is just perfect for Poser. When done right, it can give you results that are at least close or similar to HDRI, and in a fraction of the time. UNLESS Poser 7 allows the use of other plug-in render technology, like Vray for example, I don't think gluing on another fancy rendering option like HDRI to the current firefly technology is going to be very smart at this point. Don't forget, Firefly is still very young in terms of development (even though it's core is based on a tried-and-true render technology), so I think it needs more time before we throw something like that at it. Heck, people are complaining about the speed of it's rendering all the time as it is now. Imagine what would happen if they could do HDRI with it? There'd be mutiny. LOL.

Well it wouldn't take years if they'd use another Render Engin for P7 like for example Mental Ray! ;) Compared to Poser, Mental Ray is much more flexible and offers much more possibilities at relativly short render times! ;)

Mental Ray is great, no doubt, but the problem with MR is that it's quite expensive to license compared to Vray or some of the others. I think the MAIN problem with finding a company like this willing to license their product to Poser is going to be support. They aren't going to want the hassle of supporting a community that's very new, by enlarge, to this kind of high end rendering. Obviously, if people are having a hard time rendering with the simple Firefly interface, something comparitively complex like MentalRay, or even the Vray stadalone, is going to be extremely overwhelming at first. 99% of Poser users will not care to tackle the steep learning curve, sorry to say.