I’m going to integrate my particles inside an iRay scene rendered in Maya, and i want to know if there is a way to illuminate the particles with the same HDRI i’m going to use for the main render.
Cheers.
Right now there is no built-in option to do image-based lighting, but in the early days of pre-1.0 Krakatoa we did some testing with creating multiple spotlights in a hemisphere using scripting and sampling the HDRI at the lights’ positions. I think my test used somewhere around 74 lights and looked quite promising.
But there is no native way to do that in the current build I am afraid.
Interesting, i think I’ll have to do some R&D, i’ll tyr to do that, i don’t know if i’m going to know how to do it in maya, but it should be possible 
Cheers and thanks!