Projecting an HDRi onto a sphere with emission and how to get same lighting as HDRi Sky

[ssjenforcer191191191]

I am trying to get parallax with an HDRi connected to the emission node (color and specular both set to 0), and I am having trouble getting the lighting to be closer to using a regular HDRi on an Arnold Sky.

In the photos I uploaded, one is the better more direct  lighting using the HDRi on Sky object, and the other is the sphere HDRi texture with poorer lighting that looks more softer.

I have tried messing with render settings and things, but I cannot seem to find a way to get the lighting to look like the real HDRi with more shadow contrast.

Is there no real way for this to work?

I saw this demonstrated with Octane and it looked like it worked the way I wanted.

My only other idea is to render the regular HDRi Sky with the sky invisible to camera, then render only the sphere HDRi solo, then composite them both later.

Or, is there any way to have both an HDRi Sky and a sphere with HDRi emission, but have only the Sky light the scene but still have the sphere visible in one render?

[ssjenforcer191191191 · Accepted solution]

Ok, I think I finally found a workaround.

I have my Arnold Sky with the HDRi set like normal, however, I made it invisible to camera, and I excluded the sphere I made.

I then used the sphere with no material, and added a mesh_light with the object as the sphere and the color as the HDRi texture.  I turned up the intensity to an absurd amount, and this now seems to work the way I want.  I also set the mesh_light to include only the sphere.

It is a bit convoluted, and the mesh_light is literally just lighting itself up to be visible and nothing else, but it works for me, and the noise will be less than using the emission.