Quote - The only way I can imagine you could do something similar would be to make a dome 12000 miles radius

Aha. I pondered what you could possibly mean by this. It finally dawned on me that you're making an incorrect assumption.

You believe that you'll see more of a larger sphere. This is simply untrue.

In general, as objects move away from you, you see more. But when you make an environment sphere or dome larger, it isn't simply moving away from you. It's also getting bigger!

When something becomes bigger, you see less of it, unless you move it farther away, right?

And the curious thing about pictures in a giant sphere is this. As they move farther away, they also get bigger, and the two effects exactly cancel each other out. A picture mounted to a sphere (or any other shape) that moves away in exact proportion to its size does not change its apparent size at all.

When you're at the center of a very large sphere, making it still larger changes nothing about how it looks.

So - the only thing the makes you able to see more clouds or more sky is to make the field of view wider. That's entirely controlled by the camera focal length, as demonstrated above.

---

Renderosity forum reply notifications are wonky. If I read a follow-up in a thread, but I don't myself reply, then notifications no longer happen AT ALL on that thread. So if I seem to be ignoring a question, that's why. (Updated September 23, 2019)