How do you create your Skybox

frwanque

Hey,
I'm currently asking myself the question about skybox... Which way to get the best result. Half sphere, cylinder box? Do you Bake everything or do you paint everything...

it's pretty confusing.

To me I prefer Painting everything
what do you do?

Eric Chadwick

Depends on the game style. Realistic or not? If realistic, go with photos.

Some stuff here.
http://wiki.polycount.com/CategoryEnvironment#Environment_Skies

Ott

3dmotive has a great (free) tutorial on this very subject!

http://3dmotive.com/product-skydome

Eric Chadwick

Oooh, thanks. Added to the wiki.

Minos

Ott wrote: »

3dmotive has a great (free) tutorial on this very subject!

http://3dmotive.com/product-skydome

wow just tried that and came up with great results super quick. Thanks for posting it

frwanque

Hey everyone here is a source of knowledge it's crasy !

Tanks a lot

THE 5

Here is a alternative way to render cubemaps in max.

As show in the picture, you can load a spherical environmet map into the environment slot and "covert" it to a cubemap. Usefull if you got a ton of hdri environments like me.
The only advantage of this method compared to the one already in the wiki is that it directly generates a dds file. There is one big minus though, the cubemaps are limited to a size of 256x256 per face, but maybe thats enought for one.

Eric Chadwick

Yeah I should add this method, even though it has the limit. Thanks!

JordanW

http://www.e-onsoftware.com/products/vue/vue_8.5_infinite/ this program's pretty awesome for making skies/terrain. It also integrates into max so you can use mentalray + lens shader to render a 360 view.

Eric Chadwick

OK, added the Metal Bump9 method and some other stuff
http://wiki.polycount.com/Cube%20Map

also added links to Vue and Terragen
http://wiki.polycount.com/CategoryEnvironment#Environment_Skies

THE 5

Cool, thanks Eric!
Glad I could contribute a bit

frwanque

nice methods, I already tried different way to do a cube map without succes I tried to do some with sphere without any sucess.

nice way doing it.

riznof

I know this is an old thread, but just wanted to note that at least in max 2013, picking objects when you use the slate editor has issues. As in, wasn't working at all for me. Soon as I switched to the classic material editor I was able to pick objects.