Does anyone have any experience trying to create an hdr sphere from a single photo? Most of the info I've found has to do with going out and taking pictures at various exposures, but what about faking it from a single pic? This seemed to be kind of close: http://www.luminous-landscape.com/tutorials/hdr.shtml but again it…
no, you would not use HDR images for diffuse maps, the benifit of using HDR images for environments is that they can emit light and show up nicely in reflections. I could see a situation where someone might would want to have an emmissive texture be HDR but that'd be a waste in texture memory compared to just making a b&w…