Tools for painting skyboxes?

armagon

Does anyone know any tools or workflow for painting skyboxes? I'm working on a hand-painted style skyboxes and I find it very hard to paint the skyboxes using Krita on this:

My paintings always end up distorted.

EarthQuake

Take a sphere primitive, invert it, and then load it into a 3D painting app (like Substance painter). Paint your skybox on that, and then bake it onto a cube with a T-style skybox layout like you see above.

The 3D painting app will account for any distortion.

Eric Chadwick

Plus some more resources here if you want dynamic skies

http://wiki.polycount.com/wiki/Skies

poopipe

EQs technique is probably the easiest way of hand painting directly to a cube map.

Susbtance designer has panorama generation tools  that'll help with HDR generation and will distort images for you.

And I can't recommend lys highly enough for converting between layouts and generating the convolved maps you'll need for shading things. 

Blaizer

Here's an example of what EQ said using Blender:

https://youtu.be/S8gsDJs8xWA

I used to generate very cool skyboxes for my Quake 2/3 and Half Life maps using Terragen and Vue. You always can generate a good spherical sky from a scene to make more beliveable the perspective, and later, convert it to a skybox.

armagon

Wow, that video helps a lot and helped me visualize his advice. Thanks a lot, guys! I'll try to make that setup. It looks exactly what I need.