I made a model that has some reflective surfaces. But since the model is alone in the world, most of those surfaces look flat and not shiny at all. What I want is to add an environment map, probably using some generated sky texture, and "reflect" it on the model.
I created a simple "sky" texture in GIMP using some noise:
I have configured the world nodes as such:
This increased ambient light by a lot, but I am still not seeing any pattern on the reflections facing outside of the model, such as here:
This makes the model look unrealistic when rendered. I suspect the environment map has to be set inside the shader/nodes for the individual materials, but I found no info on that - or really nothing on using environment maps in cycles render at all.
I also tried this setup:
This alters the color somewhat, but it does not reflect the "clouds" and the surface still looks flat: