Yeah, understand that an environment sphere/sky dome is not really required. As Richard pointed out the containers just need stuff around them to reflect and refract. If you have a fairly encompassing scene having a sky dome won’t make much of a difference. We just wanted to point it out and include an example scene so that people didn’t the impression they look like that if you drop them in a totally blank scene.
Because so many reflective things we see in the store use mapped reflections, which don’t require other objects to provide reflections, we needed to point out these were different. We toyed with doing these with mapped reflections but the results simply weren’t impressive so we made the shaders to use only raytracing.
This set includes a scene with sky dome/environment sphere. Feel free to save it and use it in other scenes too. But, an easy, general purpose alternative, any time you have a need for a sky dome, is to just load a large sphere or cube primitive (Create menu - New primitive). Move it down so the sphere or cube is roughly centered around your scene then, in the parameters tab just turn off “cast shadows” for it.
With that you can drop in any image into the primitive’s diffuse slot, set the diffuse strength to 0% then set the ambient to white and 100% strength. Sounds strange but it works well. Photos of scenes with lots of lights or lots of varying patterns often look good for scenes with lots of reflections. I’m working on some tutorials that cover this and will go into a lot more detail.
