Yep, that's about the general idea in short. Naturally, you could skip all of that if you don't have access to a proper way of getting an Irridance map, and simply get in some shader Hemispherics into your shader instead and/or use a Fake HDR setup (you take luminance of your cube, contrast/bright it abit and voila, done.)
matt, have you considered doing a 'save to library' option that exports a selection to a new max file and creates the thumb. could be a nice quick way of saving stuff as you work.
Adding tools to my rigs that allow you to dynamically change from World Space to any Object Space. It even lets you convert after the object has been animated.
No Bake tool today :p So what can you do when your wrist from your writing hand is broken and you can't work on your character textures: you code! Today, I completed an LOD tool for "my" team :) (sorry no screen to show): Because we work with characters in several parts, was kinda tricky to generate LODs easily within a…