skies and env

I would like to know what you think is best, or even best, if you have better ideas and links.

For filling the world I actually use sky boxes. But I’ve heard (and already tested it quickly) of sky domes. What would you suggest ?
I’ve seen in some places that sky domes look bettter. It might be true, but I guess we should make a very big sky dome because my tests ended with a so bad looking thing. Then the world geometry must fit well so that we can’t see bad ‘drawings’: domes can be too spherical in looking.

Also, for filling a bit this thread, I actually use 6 textures for my sky box. But the textures I get don’t fit well in the edges. Do you suggest a big texture for all ‘adjacent’ faces (I mean faces of a same high sharing an edge), so a NPOT texture , then having only 3 textures (with that way I could use strip to draw) ?

This is because I’m actually not satisfied with that box.

Finally, how easy (or hard) it is to make sky boxes (and sky domes) look more realistic ? I mean specially animate the clouds (maybe within GLSL). Should I adopt a different way ?

There’s almost no difference between a skydome and skybox if you draw them correctly positioned around the eye.

You want to draw something that is effectively ‘infinitely’ distant and maybe augment it with a few closer phenomenon like layered clouds, it doesn’t really call for a great intellectual effort to decide on an approach.

I’m moving this to the beginner’s forum.