Lighting up the environment with an HDRI

There is an additional type of lighting for our scenes that we need to consider when creating high-quality renders – environment light. This type of light is present in the scene without being tied to a specific light object in the Outliner. There are two main types of environment light that we can use. The first type is known as ambient light. This is a basic type of lighting that adds brightness to the entire scene evenly. By default, Blender has a small amount of ambient light enabled. However, this type of lighting isn't used very often in modern renders because it's not a realistic way to light a scene. The most realistic and popular way to add environment lighting is through the use of a High Dynamic Range Image (HDRI).

An HDRI is a spherical 360-degree image of an environment that contains an incredibly large amount of lighting information in each pixel. These images are usually created with a special photography process...