Seeing as Roblox is moving towards a more modern-approach to rendering, it would be nice to have the ability to use other methodologies for rendering skies. I am proposing the ability to use sphere-mapped images, also known as sky-domes, HDRI, etc, as an additional Sky object.
This would open up the ability to easily use tried-and-true HDRI images that many artists use in a PBR workflow. While I understand that Roblox doesn’t have support for the HDRI image format (due to not having the ability to handle high precision data-buffers on certain devices), they could still use a tone-mapped version converted into a Roblox-appropriate color space (jpg/png/etc).
Internally, the Skydome could render the same way a Sky object currently renders, but would simplify to only require 1 image from the user instead of 6 images. Here is an example image:
This texture could be uploaded into Roblox, and used in a Skydome like:
Essentially, this would function just like the existing Sky object, but instead of taking 6 images, it would take 1. This would be quite useful, as I have a million and a half of these hdri images on my harddrive, and converting them into cube-maps and then uploading is no fun process.
On a side note, if you’re curious, the above sky image was uploaded to Roblox and mapped onto an inward-facing sphere mesh that I uv-mapped.
This specific HDRI was taken from https://hdrihaven.com/