Ogre Forums

I was asked by someone to make an artificial skybox. Could anybody say something about how to do that? Are there any tricks or any clever freeware tools to help doing that? Thanks.

If you can create a scene with any 3D rendering packages it's quite easy.
Simply render 6 views from a single point in all axis aligned directions with a camera set on a 90 degree view angle.

http://www.ogre3d.org/phpBB2/viewtopic. ... 3660#33660

You can create nice skyboxes with Terragen, their sky rendering is pretty convincing. Just search for "terragen" and "skybox" in google and you should find some tutorials about how to do it.

Terragen is not free for commercial use.

http://www.planetside.co.uk/terragen/registerc.shtml

$99 USD per person.

I'm using Bryce for skyboxes. Just face the camera towards the 6 cube positions and generate the 6 images. There is a tutorial somewhere on the Internet that describes how to make a skybox using Bryce

Bryce is much more expensive than terragen

jacmoe wrote:Bryce is much more expensive than terragen

Its a lot more versatile than terragen though, isn't it? though if skyboxes is all you want, then Terragen is the way to go

Indeed

Here is a very nice tutorial about Skyboxes in Terragen: http://users.pandora.be/Ariffnet/tutorials/skybox.htm

jacmoe wrote:Bryce is much more expensive than terragen

How can $80 be more expensive than $100? Bryce is not that expensive, and for $80, you get a LOT out of it. DAZ productions bought it from Corel, and they sell it online for download now.

http://bryce.daz3d.com/

For anyone with $80, you can do a lot with this program. Its a 90mb download. DAZ also has all sorts of addons and such, but that is another story.

Terragen has a demo version that is free, fully functionnal, but limited in output image resolution.

You can also use Blender to create a scene, then stick a cube in the middle of it, set it up with the env parameter in it's blender material, render, and then it contains renders of all the views you can then split up to be used as a skybox in ogre.