Working with Skyboxes

armagon

I've just read this amazing interview with Ryan Watkins about his work with the Doom environment: http://www.quadspinner.com/Blog/Doom

And i ended up being super curious about the matte-painting techniques he said he used on Halo. Are there any specific tools for painting Skyboxes? Is that a good technique or do you guys prefer rendering equirectangular maps from your favorite 3D suite?

armagon

Bump!

Obscura

I'd build the bases of my scene in a game engine or 3d package, bake that as a cubemap or equirectangular one. and paint over that right on the mesh probably. Animated layers (panning, texture changing) can also look cool. What would you like to know specifically?

armagon

Would you paint on the mesh using 3D Coat or something like that? Would you use those royalty-free HDRI as a base?

Obscura

I would use a 3d scene as a base, bake it down, and then yes, painting in something like 3d coat.

armagon

Thanks a lot for the help. I never thought about painting directly on the mesh. Do you guys know any cloud brushes or sky-specific brushes that could help? Or you do all of that from scratch?