> I thought of this when I was planning to make a scene that used some of
> those super-slow media clouds.  First, I thought I'd render the scene with
> just the sky and no other objects (using the same camera that the final
> image would use).  Then, using a macro I created, I'd paste that image map
> on a plane lined up witht he camera in the far background for all subsequent
> renders.  But then what would happen to reflections (the scene had glass in
> it)?  So I thought I'd render the rest of the sky using a spherical camera
> and map it to the sky_sphere (like you suggest).  Then, I'd have a
> high-resolution image map directly in front of the camera and a nice
> sky-sphere to handle reflections.
>

That's precisely the type of usage I had in mind when I did it (other than doing
QTVR type stuff).  Bump mapping and displacement are other uses.  Looking at an
object from the outside that has one of these images applied to it using a
spherical mapping is the same thing as an environment map, so you can do cheap
reflections with it too.

-Mike

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