Sizing to Skybox or sizing skybox to scene

Hello all,
I am a Spanish teacher and working on a virtual pueblito to use for my classes to practice various items. It is a fairly extensive town so I need to break it up into different scenes and to keep it light I need to do surrounding parts of town as part of the skybox. When I do this with a reflection probe however the skybox looks good but leaves a huge open space between where the scene stops and the box. That is essentially the box is too big or scene too small. I have seen youtube vids where they do much smaller environments such as interior of spaceship as skybox so I am wondering what I am missing.

 

A skybox doesn't have a "size" per se — it's just the background, on top of which everything else is drawn. What really matters is how much you can move around. The skybox only looks correct from one vantage point (where the reflection probe was placed), and the further you move from that spot, the less correct it looks. If you couldn't move at all (like the old Myst games), and assuming you're not rendering in stereo (i.e. VR), you could do the entire scene as a skybox, and nobody would be able to tell.

But probably in your game, players can move around. So you just need to ensure that they can never get too far away from the rendering point, and/or that any "near" bits of the skybox are usually covered by even nearer 3D objects.

Doing all this seamlessly in an environment where players can move freely is going to be very tricky. You might abandon the multiple-scenes-and-skyboxes idea and instead just use all one scene, with aggressive LOD for buildings etc. that are further away.