I want to use a hdri image as an area map in the environment light. so what type of hdri shoul i use?

spherical maps or light probes?

and what kind of hdri should i use as an map in the vex global illumination?

thanks

You can use lat long polar maps as environment maps as long as they are not our own .pic or .rat format.

It is best to use .rat files for texture maps (mipmap'ed images) in all cases. You need to use the command-line tool isixpack to create a proper rat environment map. isixpack takes either the traditional cross image or a series of 6 images that map to the standard 6 sides of a cube and builds a .rat image that contains six image planes each corresponding to front, right, back, etc… See the command line help for isixpack.

The hdri shop toolkit can easily generate the traditional cross image from light probe images. Then you use isixpack to convert to .rat files in the correct format.