Image based lighting without GI and no light

[jstrob]

Hi,

I thought that to get image based lighting from an hdri, I had to put the hdri in the GI environment slot or in a skylight AND use GI.

But it seems that when i have no light in my scene, I just put the hdri in the reflection slot and I am getting IBL without GI activated.... But as soon as i want to add a light, everything goes black except what's lighten by this light...

Also very strange when I was trying to do the same thing with my lowest render settings to get a preview, everything was black...

Is this some kind of cheat to get image based ligthting? Or is it just the default lighting? And what is the default lighting setup exactly?

[vlado]

If you don't enable GI, you will only get reflections, and default lighting, which is not IBL. If you get a dark scene with GI enabled, then it might be that your HDRI is too dark.

For IBL lighting, you can also use a VRayLight in "Dome" mode with the HDRI as a texture map.

Best regards,
Vlado

[jstrob]

oups sorry my post got duplicated when I just wanted to edit it.
Ok thanks. Just happen to have a scene where the default lighting was strongly identical to IBL. Only 10 times faster.
Most of the time I use IBL only as a guideline and then I try to reproduce it with max standard lights (with vray shadow) to get 10 times faster rendering. Anyway the most important details of the HDRI image come though the reflection.

I have another related question: are the max standard lights with vray shadow the fatest lights in vray or is it there a way to make vray lights faster than standard max lights?