IBL

Image-based lighting (IBL) is a rendering technique that uses a 360-degree photograph — usually captured as an HDR — to light a 3D scene. Instead of placing individual lights in the scene manually, IBL projects the photograph onto a sphere surrounding the scene, so every direction is potentially a light source. A bright sun in the photograph illuminates surfaces in that direction; a cool sky lights the scene from above; warm sunset clouds spread orange across the relevant facing surfaces.

IBL is the reason architectural product visualization looks so convincingly real — the lighting is genuinely a captured environment rather than a guess. Most professional product renders use IBL with carefully selected HDRI environments to match the desired mood (studio HDRI for product shots, sunset HDRI for editorial, overcast HDRI for catalog work). For architectural exteriors, an IBL of the actual time of day and location can dramatically improve realism.

AI rendering does the equivalent of IBL automatically — the model has been trained on millions of photographs lit by real environments, so it produces output with effectively photographic environmental lighting baked in. You can't directly load an HDRI into AI rendering the way you would in a traditional renderer, but you can describe the environment ('sunset sky with warm clouds') and the AI approximates what IBL with that environment would produce.