Hi Ed, it is interesting how real-life photography experience and learning crosses over to rendering as well.

One big area of that is usually lighting, which is usually a pretty difficult part - it seems like that's one really nice area of Hypershot that its focus on getting the lighting from HDRI makes it easy to get nice lighting results without manually setting up lights.

- Michael

HDRI lighting does make it fast and easy, but can also be less precise than manual lighting objects. That is, sometimes I like the overall lighting, but wish I could add a second light in a certain location ( one trick is to make two renders after rotating the HDRI and merge them in Photoshop layers).

It really depends on the object and materials you render. For example, I purchased a CD with over 100 HDRI studio environments from Dosch. Only two worked well for my particular scene. For a different model, probably a different set of their HDRI environments would work.

For most models, the default HDRI may work fine. Just as in photography I have to experiment to get the exact results I'm after.

Ed

Added to the Special thread Gallery :)