I want to hand paint my sky for a sky box to use inside Unreal 4.
I watched tutorials on how to use Nvidia texture plugin for Photoshop and create the DDS file
and then how to set it up inside U4.
That’s all fine and works like a charm.
HOWEVER … how do you actually PAINT the sky or nebula FOR the skybox?
Cant find a tutorial on that anywhere.
Essentially I need to do a 360 degree on all axis’s painting but I have no idea how to approach that.
… because there is a certain amount of distortion in each “square” and how would I paint that by hand on a 2D plane in
lets say Photoshop?
Or do I not worry about the distortion and just paint a flat plane and divide it up into squares with the power of 2?
Any ideas?
I don’t see much reason for doing that, it would be easier to render a 366-degree image in 3D. For skies there’s lots of stuff available out there, lots of free stuff too. There’s also a number of environment rendering programs that can do realistic skies if you want to render some.
For things like a nebula you could do that in 3D as well.
Alternately, if you really want to paint it by hand, I would make a sphere with the mapping you want, and then use a texture painting program, I believe Blender has that function but many other 3D programs can do texture painting like 3ds Max, Modo, Mudbox, etc. Or Substance Painter, or Mari.
Hi darth thanks I get it good idea, yeah I use Blender so I was wondering if I shouldn’t just paint in 3D on the inside of a sphere that would make sense.
Reason for not using existing assets is because I am painting a “nebula like” thing … but its not really a nebula.
It has a very unique look to it and needs to be very specific. … long story
… What I could do perhaps … is to use an existing image of a nebula and just add to it.
Maybe use the already cube mapped nebula as a “base” and then just add planes to it in 3D space inside the
world in Unreal with depth fade to make it look cloudy.
mmm …
Also I need it for a cinematic only just one shot.
So maybe just skip the whole sky box altogether and just use an imported texture painted sphere?
If its big and chews up memory it doesn’t really matter because its a rendered shot not a level.
