I think you misunderstand - you said the opposite of what the point is. The render dome with IDL is the strategy where the idea is the environment influences reflections and lighting and is directly observed in the camera, and you don't have to do anything extra to get them to agree.

What you describe, unseen lighting that mysteriously provides light without ever being actually seen, is called IBL and has been around for 7 years. You don't need any of the modern stuff for that - get Poser 6.

IBL is adjustable as well, meaning you can choose to light one side more than the other, or put different colors in different quadrants. Olivier published images to use in IBL for this purpose back in 2006 at runtimedna.

One other thing to know - I published a free environment sphere long ago that does the same. You didn't need to pay for this.

There are about 15000 free images you can use with it.

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Renderosity forum reply notifications are wonky. If I read a follow-up in a thread, but I don't myself reply, then notifications no longer happen AT ALL on that thread. So if I seem to be ignoring a question, that's why. (Updated September 23, 2019)