Quote - 10K by 5K is 50 megapixels - now way around that I suppose.

If a 4K sky render takes me 2 hours, then the 10K will take at least 12.

But - that's doing it as a Poser shader. I have thought about building a custom renderer in C++ that only does this one thing - make panoramas.

Wow! That sounds like a mammoth undertaking? Had you envisaged encompassing things like "atmospherics" and so forth? Were you planning just to generate cloudcapes with it, or terrain as well?

Certainly an impressive feat to pull off if you can do this!

One thing I would say, is that part of the reason my current renders are taking the time they are is that I'm also rendering a ground plane mesh... first it was a sea plane mesh with additional displacement... and now its an elaborate "infinite" plane terrain mesh.

If I just rendered a sky in Vue, the time would be substantially reduced. Not sure by how much... but more than half, I think.

It is probably worth an experiment along these lines perhaps before I do another landscape. Just to see how long a 10k cloudscape by itself would take...