Just to clarify Scott, I’ve done a lot of beauty product lighting and we often ran into situations where we were asked to remove lighting reflection details that would be created by having wrinkles/folds and small freq texture detail in the hdr maps. They ended up getting retouched out, so we adopted a less is more approach to studio lighting. Clean CGI with a good eye for lighting setups in general was the winning touch for that sort of thing. By no means am i against having that detail, I just see good reasons not to use it. Not all clients want photoreal. Sometimes they want the retouched, idealized fantasy of a photo. In a studio situation, having very tight control over the placement of the grad can be really useful. not being locked to maps is sometimes better than the detail they provide. But that is only my opinion… and thus I still very much welcome the softbox plugin for Maya! Also, no reason not to have the best of both worlds, by editing the hdr maps to even out the light intensity, bring them down, then add the artificial source behind to control the grad and intensity. I would find that useful. Just turn on the detail (map) when you want it, and turn it off for clean control. There, everybody’s happy;)