I'm trying to figure out the best way to bake lighting info from an HDRI into lightmaps. Specifically, our pipeline is designed so that you light your scene using Point lights and Area Lights in Maya, Create a second UV channel for everything, then run a script that bakes the lighting info down to lightmaps, and creates…
You just want your ambient lighting to contribute to your radiosity? In modo you can use a "photometric" light, which is just loading a HDR cubemap for lighting contribution, I would look into something similar.
Would suggest that he wants the HDRI content to affect the lightmap bake. Unless his statement here is totally wrong? But then there is this, which is sort of the opposite. I'm confused now. What is it that you want to do, exactly? Bake ambient lighting into your radiosity(lightmaps)? Use an HDR cubemap for ambient light…
Naw, We've got tools to capture nice cube maps... I have a pretty nice library of HDRI's, and I'm trying to figure out a way to iterate on the lighting in a scene quickly, just to try out different times of day, and play with the mood set by the lighting. I'm basically trying to adapt the techniques I've used in the past…