Thanks mate. It is great compliment coming from you π
You should try it. It is quite easy soft to go with. Image lighting is very good. You have several choice of blend. I find linear goes well with interiors (better ambient) and IBL goes best with exteriors.
At moment the power of sun is not controllable but I believe it will come in next version.
Also, slightly confusing, material editor stores relative values of bump, specular and reflection. The absolute values will come in next version, which makes more sense. Nice thing about it is that mat editor is real time and you can either use slider or maps. The bump is based on normal maps (better quality) or in absence of that bump maps would be used.
Lighting is either, sun, omni or area lights.
Animation is quite straight forward. You press record and move about and when had enough stop. At moment the files are huge as they are not compressed, so hopefully some sort of compression feature will be implemented. Camera is nice. Movement feels like real camera with parking.
Also you can save pano images with one click.
There is also possibility to save .fbx files for export of lighting to other software. I have not played with it but I hear works well with Maya and Unity.
Feel free to ask mate. If I do not know the answer than Adam will π
The workflow is quite simple. The imager quality is good. Still renders are .tiff and allows for a lot of post process without killing the image.
I agree the mapping needs to be tweaked and also corner joint is missing. π