I have a scene with a skybox (actually a sky dome), which has a sun rise image. (Oh, and an HDRI world shader).
I have the dome visibility “On” for renders, but “Off” for the viewport, because it gets in the way.
Inside the dome are some objects and a Sun light. In the viewport everything looked OK, even the shadows.
But, no shadows in the render. After several tweaks, I finally turned the dome “On” in the viewport - and my shadows disappeared… even though the sun is clearly inside the dome. If I turn the dome completely “Off”, everything is OK, so I replaced it with a flat background image.
Why does the dome affect it this way? Any ideas? Thanks!
The sun type light in Blender does not have a position, only a direction. It is at infinite distance. The dome is blocking the sun light, it doesn’t matter if the light object is inside the dome or not.
You can make it so that your dome does not block the sun by building your dome shader to be transparent to shadow rays like so:
