Use equirectangular image as environment map w/o cube map

Suppose you want to use an equirectangular image as an environment map. I think the normal way to do this is to create a separate render that uses the image as the color map on a sphere. You’d do a cube map render with a camera in the center of the sphere. What if you could skip the cube map render and pass the equirectangular image straight to your shader? This technique attempts to do that. It’s probably useful in the case that you have an animated equirectangular image that you don’t want to continuously re-render into a cube map.
Equirectangular_as_environment_map.toe (9.17 KB)

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