Custom Map Makers

Here's a little project I've been thinking about for some time, I've not fully worked out the process yet but this might inspire someone to experiment a little more.

The problem :

How to create a set of skybox images that would be suitable in a q3 type map. It would be nice if additional geometry could be rendered onto the skybox images.

A possible solution

My idea is to first of all, find a sky image, this can be pretty much anything, a photo of a sky or a flat colour.

Using any modelling app that has a camera create a hemisphere, flip the normals and texture the inside of the hemisphere with your sky texture.



Place the hemisphere in the center and add a camera (targetted) inside the hemisphere.

Move the camera target to the north and render what the camera sees, save the image as mysky_ft.jpg

Rotate the camera target and repeat the process for left, back, right, up and down. These 6 images could then form your sky.

Using this technique it would be relatively easy to make a whole lot of new, hi-resolution skies quickly and also, include objects in scene that will be rendered onto the sky.

As I say, I've not worked out the finer points, currently my images don't actually fit together and overlap.

Best image to use for this kind of skybox images render would be a 360 sky image.
In max you can apply the image and then use the viewport painting tool to fix the seams directly in max. That way when you render it everything fits and connects perfectly.
Also don't use a sphere and just cut it in half. The texture will be distorted and you will end up spending all day trying to unwrap a sphere. Which is almost impossible. Geo sphere is the right object for this job cause it's made out of triangles that are all the same size. Like the one John used.

Hey, found this tutorial a while back when I was trying to make a skybox. http://www.katsbits.com/tutorials/blend ... t-maps.php

i know this technology, the unreal 3 engine is using this

I've done this before. Katsbits' tutorial is good. I don't really remember if there was a second tutorial I used, it's been a while since I've done this. As for Sky textures you can either use 360 panoramic skies or 'fisheye' skies. You can easily convert panoramic skies into fisheye and vice versa with gimp. There are hundreds of 360 skies on the web, e.g Wikipedia (http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Categ ... panoramics). It get's a bit tricky to adjust the horizon and not to get the sky distorted too much but this is a really nice way to get skyboxes.

Check CGskies, it's a new website by CGtextures

not free...

Not free? Thought it was

xandaxs, you can still download free 5000x2500 px samples. That should be high res enough for urt. Although I have to admit, for a moment I also thought you had to pay.

I tried this in urt long time ago, following this tutorial: http://www.guildofwriters.org/wiki/Adding_Atmosphere