Hello, well i dont agree with this , because there are 2 different things here, one its to understand how the CG lights works and how to simulate real light using the cg lights. Another thing its to understand how the GI works, and recreate a real light simulation using GI, which works exactly as the real world lights.With Photons etc.. So you need to understand how the real light works with both situations, one using the CG lights to fake the real light , doing that with CG lights, you need to create tons of lights sometimes to reacreate the real world light, something that could be done with just 2 or 3 lights when using GI.But in both situations you need to understand how real world light works, the diference is that depending on what method you decide to use to recreate the light with CG, you will need to use more or less light to illumate the scene.Thats a nice image btwOriginally posted by happymat27
Image based lighting, final gather and global illumination are too often used by people, myself included, to get a quick result without understanding the fundamentals of lighting..