Creating a illustrated skysphere / skybox

artish

Hey, how would you go about creating a illustrated skysphere?

I'm coming from a 2D Background and I can't wrap my head around it.

The clouds and the mountains must be spherically distorted, so the will get displayed properly in the game engine (Unity).

Here's what I'm working with:


Right now we're working with a Skysphere where this is mapped onto, but the texture get's horribly distorted.

Help would be truly appreciated!

Eric Chadwick

What 3d software are you using? You could put your texture on a sphere, flip its normals (so the faces point inwards instead of outwards), then 3d paint inside there. Mudbox comes to mind. 3ds Max has Viewport Canvas which is a decent 3d painting tool, but a bit buggy here and there.

You could also simply use cutout polygons for this kind of skybox. Make each cloud a set of polygons, the blue sky on a dome, the mountains in front of that, etc. Then you could rotate them at different speeds to have moving clouds, with some parallax.

I put some resources here
http://wiki.polycount.net/CategoryEnvironmentSkies

artish

Ah, 3D Painting, why didn't I think of that…

I'm using Modo, so that will be no problem.

Thank you very much

stevston89

You can also create the texture like you have ( make sure it is seamless). Change the proportions to square and then use the the polar coordinates filter in photoshop and it should do exactly what you want when mapped to a sky dome.

Here is a quick example of the output from that using your image:

artish

Cool, I'm going to try that!

Thank you so much!

Sinking

stevston89 wrote: »

You can also create the texture like you have ( make sure it is seamless). Change the proportions to square and then use the the polar coordinates filter in photoshop and it should do exactly what you want when mapped to a sky dome.

Here is a quick example of the output from that using your image:

That is extremely cool! So there is some use for Photoshop filters, beyond highpass, sharpen and blur! Good thinking and it makes sense and it'S probably even cleaner than a bake.