HDRI lighting
 

This is my first post so hi everyone, I,ve used hdri in lightwave
but can anyone please point me toward any help with hdri in
Maya.

Much appreciated. Alan.

have u ever used Mental Ray?, maya comes bundled with it.

Mental Ray has an image based lighting option, when u goto into its render globals. Just choose your HDR image, and render! of course you'll need to do some tweaking, to its final gather, caustics and all that to make its look better.