To render finitely distant illumination and reflection
- Place your scene into a large sphere.
This sphere will be used as the light source. (It is geometry that gets tessellated.)
- Assign a Lambert material to the sphere and set the following attributes:
- Set colour to white.
- Set Incandescence to around 70%. (You can later increase or decrease this value to increase or decrease the intensity of the light.)
- Map the Incandescence to the HDR image you want to use.
- Render with Final Gather (see Render with final gather), with the Scale set to between 50 and 100.
- Make sure Global illumination is turned on.
- Tweak the Diffuse attribute of your object's shaders, if necessary.