How to implement a standard cubemapped skybox?

[Vasonic]

@;17574

Hi sinoth,

“I’m more curious why this hasn’t come up before. How is everyone else doing skyboxes?”

I would say it is because we started making all of our sky domes procedurally. Look at the StarterContent project for an example of a procedural sky material. It uses things like the light vector to create a sun, and uses things like the sky sphere UVs to control the horizon and zenith etc. Clouds are seprate layers. Generally you have more control with a procedural sky, although it is easier to get photo realism with a static captured real image. We only really use the .HDR files for ambient cubemaps these days.

That said, it is still a bug, one that hopefully gets fixed soon.

I am Curious… Could you guys at Epic write a tutorial or setup some samples on how to construct some of these Procedural sky boxes? I have been digging around for skybox information in the forums and have found that there are a lot of old school guys like myself who are familiar with the old ways of skybox creation but simply aren’t up to speed on these new skybox techniques.

I have done a lot of Information hunting on the skybox creation process and have found the information to be at best scares, buried, dated, unprofessionally formatted, and usually incomplete.
I think in the long run some complete tutorials on skybox creation would come to the benefit of all parties. Epic, some of it’s very enthusiastic but less experienced cliental and by extension its moderators

Among those basic tutorials I would like to have one that covers how to create a 360 degree hand painted procedural …say space skybox.
I think this particular scenario would cover a series of unique problems not faced by the traditional sky dome. I have seen a lot of dome tuts but full 360 procedural space I’d love to see. Especially if we aren’t using the technique mentioned here:

Is there a TextureCube resource for a skybox?

Some topics I hope would be covered would include:
How would said hand painted skybox be laid out in photoshop? I say hand painted because not everyone is going to use a multi exposed photo source HDR image. And if we were required to use HDR then could the tutorial cover the conversion process in Photoshop of a none multi exposed photo source image into an HDR image?

If a sphere was used to project the skybox how could one accommodate for warping and distortions? – say the skybox had a large hand painted planet with Saturn like rings. With a card you would get parallaxing of the foreground planet and background stars. Maybe this isn’t a problem anymore but I know it was in UDK.

How would the material setup for this style of skybox look and also it would be great to be given a why and what of some of the more advanced nodes used in the material.
It would help less experienced people understand how they could apply these advanced nodes in other material creations. At Least I know these would be the things I would look for if said procedural tutorial were made.