Painting on cubemaps?

Eric Chadwick

Anyone here work with cubemaps/skymaps much? Sometimes I want to paint out rendering errors, or paint in some details, and have yet to find a nice way to do it.

There used to be this plugin for Photoshop called SkyPaint, purported to let you paint on the six images while seeing them stitched together, but I couldn't get it to work.

Biggest issues I have are avoiding seams when painting across cube edges, and painting new details in proper perspective. As I get further from the center of each bitmap, the distortion is more severe since it's a cubic projection. Like if I paint a circle towards the edge, it comes out as a oval when rendered in-engine.

I was thinking about mapping the six images onto the inside of a cube in 3ds max then importing that into Body Paint to use projection paint on them.

But maybe someone has a better tried-and-true methodology they use?

EmAr

you may have already heard it but there's a proggy called Terragen. With a view angle of 90(there was a tutorial somewhere about this) degrees you can render seamless sky boxes at any res. you wish. I don't suggest using those images directly, which you may do as well, but they can work very well as seamless base textures which you can paint over, I think.

Eric Chadwick

I actually got SkyPaint to work, and it's not too bad.

I usually render scenes out of 3ds max for the cubes, then edit them as needed in Photoshop. But this time I need to add effects that won't render properly across the seams, or won't render at all.