HDR, indoors and portal lights (sky portals)

[wannabeartist]

Hi all,

 

I've been figuring out the HDR use for lighting and reflections. Here's one of the things I haven't quite understood yet about reflections.

 

If you light an interior scene by using portal lights (or sky portals in Max) with the mr sun outside, do you benefit at all from using a HDR image for the reflections intensity-wise, or is the same intensity actually already coming from the portals?

 

I mean, if you use mr sun outside your building and render on a 32-bit framebuffer, you'll get pixels that are brighter than 1. Now, does that get carried indoors by the portal lights? I tried it out and it seems to be so, but I'm not sure, am I missing something here?

 

Here's a quick test render, the big reflection on the ball has a mono values over 2 and the little ones have values around 1,5.

 

Overall, is it common practice to use HDR for reflections in and indoor archviz scene?