Light probe

This is what the light probe looks like. It's a photo I took of a chrome ball which has been distorted in a way that my rendering software (mental ray) understands. The final one I used was a combination of mutliple exposures and multiple angles to remove me and the camera tripod from the picture.
I'll use it for both the lighting and the environmental reflections (off of window, for example) in the 3D scene. 

Lighting

Armando from LeanArch asked if I could do some renders of our house plans for their website, so that's what I'm up to today. I'll be using a global illumination method called image based lighting to create the render. This works by first taking pictures at multiple exposures of a chrome ball to capture the true lighting and reflections of our back yard. These are then converted to a high dynamic range image (HDR) which will serve as a lighting cue for all the points on the surface of the 3D model. I'll post some work-in-progress shots as I go along.