Greetings all! I'm working on some art assets for a networking game programming class I'm in and we've decided on doing a space fighter style game. In the past I've generated a sphere made of white points around the player camera and turned off the depth buffer in OpenGL (this has the effect of making the "stars" always drawn in the background). I wasn't really satisfied with the results but it got the job done at the time. This time I'd like to do something involving textures. The two ways I've heard of how to do this is either cube or sphere and I was wondering which most prefer? I've got a few test textures ready and have applied them onto a simple inverted cube in 3ds max with an omni light and a camera to similuate how it would look in a game. I noticed distortions when turning the camera..the planet doesn't look spherical as it does straight on, etc. Does anyone know how to correct this? My textures are 1024x1024 jpgs just to play around with. Does something need to be done to the textures to prevent such distortions? Thanks, Dotren

if you just attached the texture to the model without un wrapping the UV's then thats you problem, if this is double dutch then you need to look for texturing tutorials, specifically UV mapping/unwrapping.

cheers.

I'm not familiar with double dutch.

I made sure to unwrap the uvw this time and applied the texture maps again. I'm still getting the same effect. The spherical planet still looks distorted when I rotate the camera certain ways...it looks more like an oval than a sphere.

I think the main issue here is depth of field when I'm rendering...its detecting the corners of the box farther away so its drawing the distance distortion on the texture map.

Would doing this skybox as a sphere instead of a cube help to solve this issue or would finding out how to turn off the depth of field in 3DSMax/our game engine work better?

Thanks for the reply!,
Dotren

The problem here isn't actually the skybox per-se, it's the position of the camera. For a skybox to be effective, the camera needs to be placed DIRECTLY at the center of the cube at all times. The most common way of doing this in-engine is to move the skybox that it's centered around the camera (But leave the rotation), render it, then clear the Z-Buffer and draw your scene normally.

This can cause unwanted 'following' effects in certain situations, but for a space scene everything should be far away enough that it will look natural.

I've done some more research into the matter and I believe its the Field of View thats the problem. I didn't take that into account when I created the textures in Photoshop.

I know, from reading some websites, how to make textures with the correct FOV in 3DS max. Basically you render a scene from the origin using a camera with an FOV setting of 90 degrees, then rotate the camera 90 degrees and repeat until you have all the 6 textures.

The problem is I'd like to do this in photoshop but I have no idea how to accomplish this FOV effect. I've played with the 3D transform filter a little bit but don't get the right results. Is there a tool I'm missing that would do this for me or perhaps a plugin I could download?

If nothing else, I suppose I could map the texture to a plane in 3DS Max and render using a camera with the FOV setting.

Thanks,
Dotren