Alright, really sorry if this is the wrong forum to post this in. Wasn't sure if it should go here or the Renders one.

Hello, by the way! I've been noticing lots of amazing, extremely photo-realistic images of digital models popping up all over the internet, and after several weeks of searching for how they did it I stumbled upon Mecabricks!

Anyway, I've been rendering with Blender (I want to learn to do it in Blender because I have some other projects I want to do with it in the future), but I can't figure out how to get an HDR image into the scene. I'm sorry to bother everyone with this question and I hope I'm not missing anything obvious, but I've looked all over the Mecabricks forums, Shop pages, and Mecabricks' Youtube channel guides to try and find anything about it. I've also been looking at Blender tutorials that explain how to add HDRIs, but so far they haven't worked in the Mecabricks template. I'm a total Blender newbie, so I don't have a clue what I'm doing wrong.

Does anyone have any advice or help they could give?

I'll explain what I did in better detail: I opened the Blender Lite template file in Blender (I've got Blender 2.79b version and Blender Lite 2.0.7 version, by the way), imported my model as a Mecabricks file (which I exported from the Workshop as a collada), and then tried to open the HDRI file (studio001.hdr from here: https://zbyg.deviantart.com/art/HDRi-Pack-1-97402522) in the environment texture node. But nothing showed up, even when I switched to render mode.
I was able to open the HDRI file in a different Blender project just fine using the same method. Any idea what I did wrong?