Rendering Sky background in the frame buffer

[busseynova]

My set up for a scene is this: Vray sun and sky in the GI override slot, with a HDRI in the reflection / refraction slots for more interesting reflections.

Is there a way of:

just rendering the refl.refraction [HDRI] image in the background of the frame buffer for previews (I also have a copy in jpg). Note image background will not work as it's a equirectangular image which needs to be captured by the scene camera

and/or

rendering it as a separate pass (vrayEnvironment element?) when I come to do the final render?

I could stick it on a dome light, but that will affect the GI, which I'd rather not do (simple/fast Vraysky GI is ok for this scene)

[vlado]

Can you post some images? I can't quite figure out what's needed. If you add a VRayLightMix render element in V-Ray 5, you will get a render element with the environment contribution, do you mean something like that?

Best regards,
Vlado

[busseynova]

Well here is a render of my slightly hacky scene at the moment. Direct light from a Vray Sun, refl/refr. from HDRI in the environment overide and GI from a Vray sky in the GI override.

I've put a jpg of a seperate sky sphere on an sphere surrounding the scene. I suspect best workflow is going to be just to render this on its own via the camera for the whole sequence so it gets the camera movement, but I can adjust its brightness in post. I just wondered if there was a more 'proper' way of doing it.