I have a game that takes place in space and I'd like to add a skybox or skydome or whatever. The programming side of that is easy, but the problem is getting the textures. How can I generate the images? Or is there a good site where I can download a space background cubemap?

What?

That makes a flat image. That's easy. But to be used as a skybox, the image tiles (6 in all) need to be distorted. If you just put regular textures in a cube, it would look very much like a cube and not like a background. I have no idea how this distortion is done, and I would think there'd be a program for generating skybox textures, but I can't find any.

I think HDR Shop is what you need, or Terragen.

http://gl.ict.usc.edu/HDRShop/
www.terragen.com

I would usually use Bryce or some other 3D program, then setup a camera with a 90degrees field of view.
Then simply render a picture for front, top, bottom, left, right, back.
Seriously.

Was there something else you were thinking of?

Otherwise you might want to check a plugin that corrects image distortion from photographs, then ADD a distortion to simulate a 90deg FoV? Although I doubt that would work very well...

Quote:

Original post by ahw I would usually use Bryce or some other 3D program, then setup a camera with a 90degrees field of view. Then simply render a picture for front, top, bottom, left, right, back. Seriously. Was there something else you were thinking of?

That works fine for 3D scenes, but for a good-looking space background (like this) you have to draw it, then somehow map it onto a sky-sphere or sky-box (probably sky-sphere is easiest). You'd think there'd be software for painting skyspheres or helping convert an image for one.