IBL became obsolete, or so the general opinion is, with the introduction of IDL is Poser 8. IBL with ambient occlusion is exactly as you said, AO through lighting. Generally it's considered "better" to use material based AO. It's redundant if you use IDL as there's built in AO. All of these things are slowly climbing the ladder of cumulative efforts towards realism... culminating in Superfly which is the current solution. All of the photorealism advocates, it's a thing, are thwarted by the available figures not being up to snuff for actual photorealism... so you see ALOT of great looking interiors and glass with caustics etc but then you see the figure's armpit and... uncanny valley. Or, in relation to Poser content rendering, by and large... alot of images that look like photos of REALLY expensive sex dolls.

Hopefully the figures/models catch up someday, even the biggest VFX companies struggle with the human realism uncanny valley bugbear. Sorry for the op ed.

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