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Not too sure what the correct terminology is, but I'm trying to apply a cube map in a non 'environmental' way- i.e. fixed to the mesh, and unchanging with camera movement.

essentially - cube mapping a sphere with arbitrary geometry. 1024x1024 x 6 Cube Map gives us the same resolution as a 4096x4096 spherical map, so I'm hoping it can applied in this way. I've got a material with a cube map loaded, but I'm not sure what setting would be needed to make the texcoords work statically. Although env_map cubic_reflection does show everything up as working, how do I make the cube map 'fixed' to the surface? Or is this not possible?

Any ideas?

You can do this, yes. Your mesh will need to have 3D texture coordinates (uvws, which OGRE supports in its mesh format - use VET_FLOAT3 instead of the more usual VET_FLOAT2 for texture coords), calculated as the normalised vector from the centre of the sphere, through the vertex in question. Bind a cubemap of the world and use those uvw's to address the texture.

It is, however, more expensive than the traditional approach of using a distorted 2D atlas style texture. Less distortion at the poles I'll admit though.

Thanks, I'll give that a go.

It's possible the sphere could be generated from a cube anyway so it would have 6 spherically distorted sides so we could use plain old 2d mapping. that would be faster and mroe compatible with older cards I guess.

-thanks again