<div dir="ltr"><div><div>David:<br><br></div>The Glossy Shader applied to a sphere captures the surrounding environment easily enough when baked.   Not sure what the best approach is for handling the UV Coordinates.<br></div><div>Here&#39;s the results for the simple setup I tried.   <a href="http://www.pasteall.org/pic/85179">http://www.pasteall.org/pic/85179</a> <br></div><div><br>------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------<br></div>Here are some links for rendering Skyboxes using Blender.<br><div><div><div><div class="gmail_extra"><br><a href="http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?345252-Rendering-baking-environmental-map-%28cubemap-skybox%29-in-Blender-2-7x-how">http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?345252-Rendering-baking-environmental-map-%28cubemap-skybox%29-in-Blender-2-7x-how</a><br><br><a href="http://25x8.blogspot.ca/2013/04/rendering-skybox-for-unity-using-blender.html">http://25x8.blogspot.ca/2013/04/rendering-skybox-for-unity-using-blender.html</a><br><br><a href="http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?241187-Rendering-a-cubemap-skybox">http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?241187-Rendering-a-cubemap-skybox</a><br></div><div class="gmail_extra"><br>If I remember correctly, Photoshop Elements has a tool for converting between Equirectangular and Spherical coordinates. <br><br>------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------<br></div><div class="gmail_extra">There is also a link here for setting up Mercator Projection UV&#39;s on Blender Stack Exchange<br><br><a href="http://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/3315/how-to-get-perfect-uv-sphere-mercator-projection">http://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/3315/how-to-get-perfect-uv-sphere-mercator-projection</a><br></div><div class="gmail_extra">------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------<br><br>Encoding additional information in normal maps sounds nicely obscure :) ,  anyways,  the following thread shows how to setup up nodes for baking Tangent maps with bump mapping and maybe this can be used as a starting point for what you want to do since you should be able to bias the normals towards any direction you choose by using the Mapping node to transform vectors.   Shift+a -&gt; Vector -&gt; Mapping <br></div><div class="gmail_extra"><br><a href="http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?348799-Baking-Cycles-Procedural-Normals-to-Texture">http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?348799-Baking-Cycles-Procedural-Normals-to-Texture</a><br><br></div><div class="gmail_extra">It looks like the map is in linear space, maybe it would look right for games after being Gamma corrected.<br></div><div class="gmail_extra">-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------<br><br></div><div class="gmail_extra">The chairman of BF can usually be found on <a href="http://irc.freenode.net">irc.freenode.net</a> #blendercoders every Sunday morning for the weekly meetings about 7:00am-ish North American Pacific Time.  After the meeting he usually hangs around to chat with people for a while.  <br>He&#39;s friendly and likes to talk so you might consider speaking directly to him.  His username there is &#39;Kaito&#39;<br></div><div class="gmail_extra"><br><br><br><br></div><div class="gmail_extra"><br><br><br><br><br></div></div></div></div></div>