Change sky in cube 6x1 rendering

[dreidesign]

Hey guys,
I'm wondering if there is the possibility to change the sky in a cube 6x1 rendering in post.

The only way I would think of at the moment is to convert the image to a spherical panorama, change the sky in photoshop. Save only the sky and convert it back to cube 6x1 and merge it into the original cube 6x1 rendering.

But there have to be a more "professional" way of doing it

[yolov]

That's a tough one. Rendering a 6x1, or a spherical for that matter, will produce a very specific breakdown of the viewing angles to be put back together in a VR (for example) viewer. You can save out the 'backgroun' render element separately, but again - it will be saved as viewed from the respective 6x1 or spherical camera and I can't think of a way to edit that in post. You can try and replace the actual 'environment'/'background' image in your render and render just that to output a 'background' render element and replace it in post.
I hope that other people can come up with better ideas.

[Neilg]

We render in passes for VR all the time - map the sky onto a sphere, render 6x1 with no GI/burn at 1, render the main image with an alpha channel and comp it like you would a normal rendering.
Why would you convert the rendering to a spherical image when you can render the sky in 6x1?

[dreidesign]

We render in passes for VR all the time - map the sky onto a sphere, render 6x1 with no GI/burn at 1, render the main image with an alpha channel and comp it like you would a normal rendering.
Why would you convert the rendering to a spherical image when you can render the sky in 6x1?

Its just that we usually render with normal vray sky as the environment and pasting a proper/matching sky afterwards in photoshop. We just switch between different sky's to see which matches the best. In the past when we rendered "normal" spherical panorama's that wasn't a problem.

But yeah I get it, to use 6x1 we have to do it in 3D.