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I think sky domes just don't serve a viable function in Iray like they did in 3dl. A sky dome is a huge false sky that you never see in the real world. In a perfect world we would be able to just smack the skydome texture into the environment map slot and skip the addition of the sky dome geometry in the scene. I suspect though that would be a bit hit and miss. However, a couple of really solid HDRIs that are mostly just sky should pretty much cover the need for sky domes.
Could be right!! I guess we will see, generally tho I have found that in real world terms things dont always pan out perfectly, often its a kind of trade off (you can no longer do this...but you can now do this...sort of thing) , time will tell I guess, I cant make any real statements about what the limitations of HDRis may be, without doing a lot of tests.
One thing about sky domes tho...is an advanced geometry skydome could do overlays (clouds on one level and sky on another etc...)and a lot more, thats one advantage of actual geometry that you will not get with a 2D image...no matter how good it is, then theres the rotation of skies to cameras...layered domes could do 2 way rotations to mix things up, the possibilies of skydomes is actually still in its infancy really, then theres the mapping options as well...but like I said we will see how HDR images perform in the actual situation.
I don't think that there is anything preventing using that concept going forward. Just without the sky dome for a background. If, for example. you created a simple sky blue hdri with a sun and used that in the environment slot then you could have a dome that used transparency to create cloud layers. How those got rotated would influence if they shadowed or not. Right now most of what is available is photo based but I don't see any reason we need to be limited by that do you? There are other worlds out there that will not have blue skys or green grass and I'm not sure there are photos for that just yet.
I don't think that there is anything preventing using that concept going forward. Just without the sky dome for a background. If, for example. you created a simple sky blue hdri with a sun and used that in the environment slot then you could have a dome that used transparency to create cloud layers. How those got rotated would influence if they shadowed or not. Right now most of what is available is photo based but I don't see any reason we need to be limited by that do you? There are other worlds out there that will not have blue skys or green grass and I'm not sure there are photos for that just yet.
Lots of possibilities for sure.
Experimenting and testing...trial and error .....usually produces some kind of workable method, right now, I have tried a lot of the environment settings in Iray, and some produce unexpected results, like using a sphere as the sun...even with the proper assigning and setting it as the SS sun...it influences the shadows...but still there is some kind of infinite light that is beyond that, that appears to carry a larger influence on the scene. (beyond even what indirect lighting or ambient light would do)
So its difficult to go into the creative aspects of the renderer without knowing exactly what its doing...and then theres the point that its still in beta.