These
are fully spherical environments created using Dreamscape
by Sitni Sati. The resolution should be sufficient
for most purposes, such as generating a quick environment
suitable for TV resolution with a "human eye" FOV.
To
safely download the high-res versions to your harddisk,
right-click on the images and choose "Save Target as..."
To
seamlessly integrate these panoramas with you scene,
you might want to use a layered fog (MAX atmospheric effect)
in addition, with instances of your environment texture as
"Environment Color Map" for the fog. Thus the pre-rendered
horizon and the ground level of your scene should blend seamlessly.
Also you will get more natural results if you map these environments
on a relatively large sphere surrounding your scene, rather
than using them as MAX environment map only.
Add
realism yourself by placing a light source and/or
a superbright object at the position of the sun (even for
the case that you want to do pure image-based lighting only,
which these maps aren't really suitable for). In dark reflections
these skies won't look very realistic, since the seemingly
overbright parts of course don't exceed the RGB spectrum and
hence will look "clamped" as well. This will be
most obvious for darker reflections of the sun itself, hence
you should create a light source for an additional specular
highlight or a very bright object for a more accurate reflection.
Optionally you might also want to add a lensflare, but please
don't exaggerate it ;-)
Also these maps aren't post-processed in Photoshop yet. I
leave this up to you, because it would only make sense for
the finished rendering, anyway.
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