Somewhat later than the others but I have made my first tests with image
based lighting using the MLPov hdr image functionality.  Here are two
results.

It seems it works very nicely on surfaces with specular reflections. 
Diffuse surfaces require high rad settings and using normals instead of
real surface geometry looks much more faked than with light sources.

Another difficulty is to find the right hdr map for the intended
lighting.  The probes on

http://www.debevec.org/Probes/

are quite limited in that concern.  Things on

http://www.akuratny.com/hdri.htm

look very promising but lower quality and different mapping (and only
above horizon).  It would be very nice if POV-Ray could also write high
dynamic range images.

I have also made tests for combining HDRI with photons generated using
light sources.  The second attached image shows this.

Christoph

-- 
POV-Ray tutorials, include files, Sim-POV,
HCR-Edit and more: http://www.tu-bs.de/~y0013390/
Last updated 31 Dec. 2002 _____./\/^>_*_<^\/\.______

Post a reply to this message

Attachments:
Download 'hdri_01.jpg' (79 KB) Download 'hdri_02.jpg' (38 KB)

Preview of image 'hdri_01.jpg'

Preview of image 'hdri_02.jpg'