What's a good image map, to map onto a sphere (as a cheap environment) so that chrome can reflect something?
The one I made makes the reflections look bleh

You need hdri

Well... it doesn't need to be THAT accurate.
I'm not using it to illuminate, just something to reflect.
Just looking for suggestions of types of photos / modifications to them that make decent reflections

Use MRs env.

Natashka1954: that makes a big enough difference? I thought it was just a mapped sphere too?

Its for realistic reflections important too

Vertox: you have a point. I'll have to search for some free HDRI images.

It would be the same as if you would create a sphere with spherical mapping
Free good hdris are hard to find
I would say i haven't found any
Except you make a church scene
Or something in that uffizi court
;)

You can also use animated caustic movs

Heh, I don't have the time to set myself up to make HDRI maps now.... man someday. =P
Its such a frickin' sweet concept

I did my own hdrimaps
But since i have no good program to work on those i have composed them so badly

There are free hdri out there in the web

But there are really only a few

Http://www.hdrimaps.com/downloads.html
Free there, but they seem kinda low-rez.

How big is your scene?

You don't need highres for most purposes

Not big, it's just a single object

Wouldn't think if its only reflections
How would you go by creating the reflection environment - put everything inside of a sphere and texture it with your refl. map?

what I did is just made a sphere, and mapped a texture to it, then set the sphere's primary visibility off, and kept visible in reflections on

Vagon: do you render with mr ?

So you need a texture with lots of things - not so much the detail

In mr you should actually use the ibl-node
Especially if you tend to work with finalgathering or other advanced rendering techniques

Vertox, yes, of course =]
Natashka1954, pretty much. just curious what you guys use for this kinda stuff. (my original question I guess) =]

Then you actually have to use it to reduce rendertime
You can set the ibl-node to spherical or angular projection

Wow... IBL takes a lot longer to render