At this point, I'm at a loss for how to make skyboxes. I've created a few in terragen, (I'm really quite good in terragen, actually) and I have a panorama editor that I can use to edit spherical maps in 2D. This program is called Panotools, and it isn't very good. Also, I am missing a couple of things. Firstly, I have absolutely no good way to switch between coordinate modes. I work in Hammer, UnrealEd, and Blender, which use six seperate images, spherical maps, and one image of six cube faces in strange rotations, respectively. Moving skyboxes back and forth between Hammer and Blender isn't too difficult, although it's more difficult than it really should be. However, moving them back-and-forth into UnrealEd is borderline-impossible. Does anyone know of a good way to quickly remap from skyboxes to skydomes? Is there a better program than panotools to edit the details of skyboxes without causing too much distortion? Panotools allows you to view spheremaps from inside of them, export the current view to an image, edit that image in 2D, and reimport it in it's exact place. However, the workflow here is very slow and quite awkward, and it's impossible to put in large features. I suppose large features don't belong on a skybox anyway, because they WILL be distorted, but it'd be nice to at least be able to put in slightly larger clouds. A photoshop plugin would be a really nice way to avoid moving sub-images back and forth. There used to be something called SkyPaint, but that's like 8 years old... I'm also looking for sky generation programs that give you a bit more control than Terragen. Has anybody used Aurora for skyboxes? Is it any good? Thanks! -bris [Edited by - brisingre on April 8, 2009 9:26:15 PM]

I don't know about most of questions, but here is an article on how to convert a skybox into something that Unreal 3 can use.

That pretty much answers one of my three questions. Thanks, mate. I've answered the second for myself, PanoTools is much more powerful than I had imagined. It supports much higher resolutions than I though it did, and it has zoom controls to add larger features. A plugin would still be nice, though. It claims to have one built in, but I haven't seen the GIMP version work. I haven't gotten a chance to try the Photoshop one.