Skybox/Dome with Cycles?

Hello all!

I’m still in the learning process with Blender and recently I decided to tackle a new project. When I do this I usually try to incorporate as many new tricks/tools that I haven’t learned yet, and one particular one was working with Cycles. I’ve already made some promising materials for my meshes but on one of the new things I decided to try I’ve hit a little snag. I wanted to make a skybox for my scene, but I’m not finding much headway yet, and the tutorials on skyboxes I’ve found so far have all been with BI.

So besides wondering how you actually make a skybox in cycles, I’ve got a few other questions too, first of all - are animated skyboxes possible? I know you can add movies or GIFs as image textures in BI, but does this extend to skyboxes and/or cycles? And if so, does anyone have a link to free high res animated skyboxes? :wink:

Also, is other lighting recommended when using a skybox or is the sky also an emit? If so, what might be a good setup for natural light?

In cycles, you set up a sky texture. You can turn adjust ray visibility as needed, and in the node editor, if you use a map node you can move it around and rotate it.

http://www.onigirl.com/pipeline/Images/Sample_SkyBox.jpg
That’s what a skybox is, but the same deal also works with using a sphere or half a sphere. Is there a more popular term for that method than skybox/skydome?

But either way, Alain, that Sun Position plugin looks amazing! I’ll give that a shot and see what I can come up with!