For lighting an interior scene in 3ds max, is there a significant difference between using an HDR directly in the environment or using it in a skydome light? In both cases I am using portal lights, but for the hdr in the skydome case there is a portal interior mode that can be set for optimization. whereas when using the HDR directly in the environment there is not. Can anyone clarifiy these possibilities?
The environment tab way has portal mode as well, if you reach into Advanced mode in the environment rollout in render settings.
Personally I never use the environment slot because I like to treat all light nodes systematicly in the scene, placed somewhere, where all the technical nodes live.
Thank you very much for the answer! It seems that is always set for interiors/exteriors so I imagine the result will be the same!