GI Fake w/out GI_Joe or the like
 

What would be the best way to illuminate a scene without GI_Joe, or any other thing like it? (cant get it to work for somereason here at school)

if you really need that sort of look you can create a dome light setup fairly easily by using duplicate options. Apart from that you could render with hard shadows and then get the shadow pass and blur the hell out of it to get "soft" ahem shadows.

Alan