Difference in lighting an interior scene with HDR on a skydome light or directly in the environment map slot.

[Anonymous]

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?

[madsd]

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.

[Anonymous]

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!