Help! Trying to make Skydome and Failing Miserably (Any VUE users?!)

DrowElfMorwen

I need help on two things.

1) First, I used my first iRay skydome recently, or at least tested it in a scene. NOT one that I made but was bought as part of a scene on the DAZ store. Well, a long time ago I made an hdr image in Vue Complete 2015, to import into DAZ. Since using it in the Environment slot of Render Settings either, a) makes the image too washed out but gives good light, or b) makes the background image way too dark and it's still washed out, I realized, hey, I can put my own image in this skydome!

And to be honest, it worked! I mean, it's gorgeous!!! However, there was one severe problem: the skydome was only half of a sphere and I needed a full sphere. So, no problem, right? Cause I just saved the settings with my image as a shader, which would then be applied to a newly made sphere primitive.

Well, like all things that SHOULD work without issue, it didn't quite work. First, I had to turn on two-sided light, which made no sense to me. After all, the original half Skydome showed the light inside, so why didn't this one? It was then I learned about flipping normals with the geometry editor, which brings me to my next question:

2) Did DAZ Remove the Ability to Flip Normals in the Geometry editor?

I looked at an unforgiveably-long tutorial from 2017 on how to flip normals because I need light shining inside the dome, not outside (If I do just enable two-sided light, aren't I adding to rendering time for calculating light that won't even be in the image?) Anyway, I could not find this option in the right-clicked menu where it previously was, and neither does it appear anywhere else. I'm REALLY hoping DAZ didn't remove something so useful and I'm just missing it.

Secondly, no matter how huge I make this Skydome my full 360 degree image won't stop curving.

But, I still have my main problem: making a working Environment-tab HDRI. I cannot for the life of me figure out why my Vue render did not work how it's supposed to in the environment tab. I checked all the right boxes, so what's going on? I mean, using the huge .png version of the same render in the skydome looked GORGEOUS, so what possibly is the issue with the HDRI I made? After all, a lot of working HDRIs for 3D renderings have been made in Vue.

I do want to specify the main thing is that it is essential to be able to use my images in the Render Settings-->Environment slot, becuase I need an Infinite Sphere with ground. That's the ONLY way it'll do what I need it to do.