Testing my lightdome code on a more complex model. The lightprobes I 
took myself, and while they look pretty bad close-up, they work nicely 
for slightly dull reflections and for generating image based lighting rigs.

The lightdome code is extremely simple - I just sample the environment, 
completely at random, then choose the N brightest samples. This works 
well for lightprobes with large areas of light (with low sampling) or 
lightprobes with one or more very, and roughly equally, bright lights 
(like those with the sun in them - I sample these images highly to hit 
the near point light sources). It does less well on other mixes of 
lights, and you do have to tweak the number of samples to get the effect 
you want.

On the plus side, I write out the lights to a file, which means I can 
avoid the sampling time in subsequent renders (e.g. my stochastic 
rendering rig).

I'd perhaps like to try a median-cut algorithm at some point, as that is 
a good way of getting all the light from the probe distilled into a 
minimum number of representative samples, but I'm still not convinced 
it's the best way of getting the most accurate area lights and fill 
lights for the probe.

The Buddha image doesn't have any anti-aliasing, so it could be made to 
look a little better. And I added a slight glow in Photoshop because I 
just can't stop myself...

Cheers,
Edouard.

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