I read this rather interesting article on vfxpro:
http://www.vfxpro.com/article/mainv/0,7220...0,19376,00.html
It discusses an XSI-made short film called "Fruits of Labor" by Giant Studios, where they used 360-degree photos for radiosity lighting. The technique sounds very interesting, but I'm not sure how to setup this kind of lighting in XSI.
So, if anyone has an idea about how to do it, I'd appreciate any tips!
"All the reflections you are seeing," Poat said, "are from the light bouncing off the spherical environment" - simply put, the object only receives reflections from the image, mapped on the hemisphere around it. I think the tutorial on GI in the XSI tutorials sections here describes exactly that somewhere. Although, when I first read the article at VFXPro , I thought Poat used sth similar to HDRI, but this feature is not implemented in XSI yet, so the final explanation is pretty simple, I guess.
AAAH, by the way the movie is superb. The visuals made me drool, but this happens when the right guy is in the seat. Poat has created one of the most amazing pure CGI in history - The Matrix sequences, etc.