The image based lighting technique is almost essential in computer graphics nowadays; as the name itself says, it's a technique to light a scene based on the pixel color information of an image, usually an hdr image (High Dynamic Range image); other image formats can also work, although not so well.
In Blender it's possible to obtain IBL both in BI and in Cycles, although with different modalities.
Start Blender and load the previously saved Gidiosaurus_3D_layout.blend
file; save it as Gidiosaurus_IBL.blend
.
We can divide this recipe into two parts: IBL in Cycles and in Blender Internal.
Let's start with the Cycles Render engine: