Now, I like how the Physical sky setup has been made in Softimage 2011. But if I am building up materials I use procedurals quite often for masking purposes and distant objects etc. The trouble is that I can not find a way to preview procedural/bitmap textures in render region other than piping it through one of the surface shaders diffuse slot. This often results inaccurate results.

With Soft 2010 I just used in such case a constant material, disabled all the properties except incandescence, bumped up the incandescence value and I had no troubles. But now everything seems to behave somehow different.

What do you do work around such situation?

Thank you!

EDIT: I have figured that it still works. Weird, it did not on one scene. But under Pass/Edit there are two options. Initialize Physical Sun/Sky shader and Initialize Sky shader. With a latter one I seem to have correct result in the render region when I push the incandecsence to 10000. With the Initialize Physical Sun/Sky the result has less contrast and whites are washed out. Why is it behaving like that?