Generating photorealistic sky in computer generated animation

An article of manufacture, comprising:

• a computer storage medium comprising at least a memory or a storage device
• computer program instructions stored on the computer storage medium that, when processed by a computer, configure the computer to:
• load a plurality of buffers with a sky texture and a diffuse cubemap, wherein the diffuse cubemap comprises a map of information representing ambient lighting for illuminating a scene, the sky texture and diffuse cubemap originating from samples of actual sky taken over a period of time;
• receive scene data, a current time and a viewpoint;
• render the scene data according to the viewpoint and the diffuse cubemap;
• sample and interpolate the sky texture according to the current time;
• and
• apply the rendered scene data as a foreground image to the interpolated sky texture as a background image.

A computer-implemented process, comprising:

• loading a plurality of buffers with a sky texture and a diffuse cubemap, wherein the diffuse cubemap comprises a map of information representing ambient lighting for illuminating a scene, the sky texture and diffuse cubemap originating from samples of actual sky taken over a period of time;
• receiving scene data, a current time and a viewpoint;
• rendering the scene data according to the viewpoint and the diffuse cubemap, such that objects in the scene data are illuminated based on at least the diffuse cubemap;
• sampling and interpolate the sky texture according to the current time;
• and
• applying the rendered scene data as a foreground image to the interpolated sky texture as a background image.