Quote - ice-boy:

Everything I do is faster than anybody else's implementation. :)

I'm impressed that you notice the subtle stuff I do - always. You're the only one who really got excited about gamma correction in shaders, and realized you could do it yourself all over the place.

My new shadow catcher has the same behavior. Poser has a built-in shadow catcher. I am making a new one in shaders, which should be slower. Mine does 10 times more stuff, renders better, and has lots of control parameters. But mine is faster than the built-in one.

I work on these tools for days, weeks, even months. The EnvSphere and its shaders took me about 150 hours. I did over 400 test renders. The GenIBL tool took months of research, experimenting, and testing. I went down so many wrong paths on that one. Then one day, while I was on my usual 2 hour drive to one of my clients, I was thinking about how refraction works, and I worked out how to do the perspective correcting lens in my head. I was so excited, I coded it up as soon as I got out of the car. I was so surprised it worked. Who would have thought that setting the index of refraction to 1,000,000 would have any practical use? Still, after that I fine tuned the number of polygons in the probe for hours, trying to find the minimum that produced accurate reflections, so it would be fast.

well i notice things buecause i read everyhitng you writte. i like all the technical stuff that you do. i dont always understand them but i try my best to do. 
you are obvious a very smart man. you are also a thinker. i think you wrotte many time that this is your hobby and that you like the chalange. i agree.
i just hope ...i really hope that one day the people who are working on poser will take your ideas.

the best things about this new sphere is :

1. preview.
   this is a big thing because you can set your scene in 5 seconds. before that it was almost a pain to do it with all the renders.
2. fast rendering.
   it works so fast its not even funny anymore.

about gamma correction: are you really sure that i am the only one? gamma correction was basicly the last step where you made poser renders look.....REALISTIC. the difference is obvious. i really think there should be a sticky. and a mini tutorial. there should be NOOOOO renders without gamma correction.

shadow catcher? hmmm. whats this? when you render only the shadow and make the ground invisible?

GEN IBL is groundbreaking :)