Quote - This is a reduced size version of one I made in Poser, using a procedural shader and doing the projection math right in the shader.

Very cool :-) As a sky, that's pretty good... and fairly comparable to perhaps a single layer of the cloud forms that are in these Vue renders?

2 hours or so is obviously a lot better than 48 hours... or indeed twice that.

But then, I guess the point of these Vue-made spherical panoramas is that they're pre-baked... its just a case of finding the best way to pre-bake them at sufficient resolution?