Cylinder Lighting

This is a nifty approach to creating simple environmental lighting using a cylinder and the Cycles render engine.  

First we start off with our HDR or sky image.  These can be downloaded from many sites online.  See the one of the Links entries for more information.

First create a cylinder (without ends capped) and wrap your scene with it.

Next, take a side view [NUM 1 or NUM 3] and, in edit mode [TAB], hit [u] for the UV menu and select Cylinder Projection.

Next, switch over to the UV Edit view [Ctrl + LEFT].

Select Clip to Bounds to automatically have the mesh fit the image box.

Because Cycles renderer does not support image assignment to UVs yet, switch to the Blender Renderer.

Now select the image from the beginning and load it into the UV map.

Adjust the mesh so that it fits the image.

Now the cylinder can use an emmissive image texture to create light for the scene.  You can follow this entry for that: Emmissive Image