Environment Lighting Canvas Turns Off Scene Lights?

xstan

Is there a way to save to an .exr file without having the scene lights turned off? I'm trying to create an HDRI of a big city scene at night and the lights are on in preview and normal renders, but as soon as I try to render to the Environment Lighting canvas, it turns the scene lights off and I'm getting a dark city as my HDRI instead.

Richard Haseltine

That is what Envioment Lighting means - as opposed to scene lighting, the light nodes and emissive surfaces. What are you wanting to exclude from the render?

xstan

Ahh, I thought that might be the case.

I was just wanting to create an HDRI from the scene so I can render other scenes with it without the load of a full city's worth of objects. The only instructions I could find for creating an HDRI tell you to use the Environment Lighting canvas to get the .exr file from it. 

I did find Jay's video on the Daz 3D youtube channel that discusses how to turn normal renders into HDRI in photoshop so I'm actually trying to do it that way right now.

I swear there used to be a method of doing it that did not use the canvasses and that did also take in scene lighting? I don't remember how it worked, though. 

Is there another method that would still work that doesn't require going into photoshop?