I have been banging my head against the wall trying to use Spacescape and maya to make my own .FBX that i can import and use as my own skydome. Not having much luck. The guy in the tutorial video uses 3ds and I’m just not sure how to translate it to Maya. Anyone have any experience with this?
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What exactly is not working when you import it? 
Also make sure to try this tutorial: https://juarez3d.files.wordpress/2011/06/tutorial_animated_skydome_v1-3.pdf (just till chapter 2)
I’m struggling with the same problem. I have 0 knowledge about the material editor in 3ds . Is the general approach adding 6 different UV maps on each face? I prefer a skybox, because you can create cool looking skies with spacescape and I don’t see a good way of doing it with skydomes, like how do I make a good looking texture for a skydome, what should I consider, is one 2k texture enough, then using distortion to get the skydome texture? If you guys give me all the answers I need, I make a fantastic tutorial in Blender :3. <3
You can either add one large texture to your skybox or use different material slots + uv for that.
How to create a good sky texture -> take a look at the upper link
A 2k texture should be good enough for a skybox
The 3ds Box Mapping modifier adds a single UV channel, where each face of the box maps between (0,0) and (1,1). You may then want to edit each of the faces separately to orient the UVs in the way that the sky textures needs.
Btw: You don’t need to tesselate to a sphere. A box, centered on the camera, painted at infinity, with proper texture material clamping, will be just as smooth as a sphere, and will actually be free of distortion because it exaclty matches the projection used to render each of the sides of the box.
Also, the box doesn’t need to be two-sided; you just need to apply the “Normals” modifier to it to turn it inside-out, so you “see” it from the inside, and “cull out” the outside.
Okay, doing the skybox method now. I imported the skybox.fbx file from Blender (1 sided, flipped normals, 6 UV channels, 6 Materials, 6 Textures) into ue4, I changed the textures (texture group) from world to skybox and changed every material from Lit shading model to unit (and ofc plugged the texture into emissive). *Also changed the texture x-and y-axis tiling method from wrap to clamp, don’t know how useful this is :3
Seems to work great on a Blender cube with huge scaling (is that what you mean with “painted at infinity”?), are there any other adjustments I should do (for example changing other settings on texture or material). I also read a youtube comment where some guy said, this could be done with 1 material. Also, does “centered on the camera” means moving the whole cube each frame via code?
Still some confusion, if you want to make a space game, can you also use 2 skydomes, is there any distortion in the middle? What are the benefits of a skybox compared to a skydome vice versa. Also, these .dds files, are they just all 6 textures in 1, is there any benefit to use them? And the last question, the third method of skies are procedural skies, are these 1 of the method above + moving noise for clouds (really basic overview, I heard it takes much time to master procedural skies). Would be cool to have answers for all these questions in a crispy tutorial video! <3
Does anyone have experience doing this with Maya ?
Yes, you should absolutely set the mode to clamp!
At the core, a “sky box” is really a function that maps “world space direction from camera to pixel” onto an “infinitely far away texture/color.” Environment maps can do this, but are generally slightly less efficient in the texturing hardware than “plain” geometry texturing (or at least was, in previous generations) and thus all the special work to create a box and map it with six different textures instead of using a cube map.
Using a single material instantiated with six different textures makes it easier to globally change the appearance of the skybox – dimming, brightening, exploding, etc.
By “rendered at infinity,” I mean special renderer support to render the skybox “behind” everything else. If the renderer doesn’t have a pass/feature/hack for this, then a Really Big Box is the second best, but if you move a noticeable fraction away from the center of the box, the parallax will start getting skewed.
There is no benefit to a sky sphere instead of a sky box. Some people use them because they don’t understand how the rendering pipeline works for the box case. In general, a skybox is not supposed to be “normal geometry” but is supposed to have a few special bits of support. I can’t find this being supported in Unreal Engine, though, hence the slight hacks.
Moving the box with the camera: Yes, if you want to avoid parallax shifting as you move the camera, the skybox should always be centered on the camera position, but properly rotated to be “fixed” in world space.
A skybox actually just needs to be 1,1,1 in size, assuming all the other render states are correctly set up when it renders.
Finally, on procedural skyboxes: You can have as few or as many passes as you want. For example, you can have a dark background with slight nebulae/color swirls. Then add small billboards to the box mesh/geometry for brighter stars and sky features. You can also overlay with shaders that blend various kinds of math and noise functions to generate interesting patterns. In the best of worlds, the “darker” swirls will be encoded full-bright in the texture, and then dimmed in the shader; this will significantly reduce the appearance of compression artifacts.
Finally: Doing it with Maya? Sorry, I’m not a Maya user. Create a box. Turn the normals inside out. Map a different texture to each face. Rotate the UV coordinates so they line up. Export, and enjoy! Tutorials for each of those steps should be available on the Autodesk web site or Youtube…