I want to revive this topic once more now that I finally played around with the shader again. I have to admit that my interest in this 1y old project got triggered by that new real sky add-on that just came out on the blender market.
Honestly I made no changes to the shader itself yet. I threw it into 2.8 and eevee is definitely bringing its power to the next level. It works really well with real-time.
Here is an animation I rendered in HD with a render time of only 4s per frame:
You have to know that this sequence would have most likely not even rendered in cycles (my GTX 1070 crashed when i tried). So that is a big deal for the viability of this method, even though it’s ‘only’ working well in Eevee.
Here’s a quick demonstration of the real-time behavior:
With Eevee I can really imagine picking this up again and making this into a polished shader with decent documentation.
Let me know if you are interested