environment map, by enabling the Panorama option in the camera.
http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Doc:2.6/Manual/Render/Cycles/Camera#Panorama
The focal length or sensor settings are not used, the UI can be tweaked still to
communicate this, also panorama should probably become a proper camera type like
perspective or ortho.
By default lighting from the world is computed solely with indirect light
sampling. However for more complex environment maps this can be too noisy, as
sampling the BSDF may not easily find the highlights in the environment map
image. By enabling this option, the world background will be sampled as a lamp,
with lighter parts automatically given more samples.
Map Resolution specifies the size of the importance map (res x res). Before
rendering starts, an importance map is generated by "baking" a grayscale image
from the world shader. This will then be used to determine which parts of the
background are light and so should receive more samples than darker parts.
Higher resolutions will result in more accurate sampling but take more setup
time and memory.
Patch by Mike Farnsworth, thanks!
