Is there an efficient way in Photoshop to create the skybox texture? I want to just make one image and break that apart to create the five I need. I thought about it for a while but can't really come up with anything. Thanks for any help.

First you need several very wide angle photos in the primary directions. Otherwise you'll get a very bad and distorted looking skybox.

This sounds like a good idea for a small utility.

* Load in the image
* Use a snap-to-grid tool to outline the boundaries of the various views (ie top, etc)
* Drag the name of the view to each "slice"
* Click "Render" and the utility exports an image for skybox use.

To make it even better, have the ability to generate skyboxes within the app. For example, a very very basic version of the Bryce interface to create skies.
* Set cloud type
* Set density of clouds
* Set color of clouds
* Set day time/night time
* Set sky color
* Set haze
and so on...

All of the above can be done with various tools, but if one small app could do it all....

That's what I was hoping to have. I don't have a base image to be broken up. I need to generate this image. I can use Photoshop to break up images but can one generate the image in Photoshop? Or if someone does make this utility, please post about it.

Carlos: I believe terragen has the ability to do most or all of those things. I've used it in the past to make sky boxes and it worked great!

[edit: from your one app list that is..]

Good tip.

kberg Wrote:I believe terragen has the ability to do most or all of those things.

I was just hoping for a way to create the images in Photoshop so that I could get exactly the look I wanted and then be able to tweak little things later. I'll try terragen for a while but from my quick experience it didn't look like what I wanted.

Yeah, I understand.. I was just pointing out that Terragen could do lots of the things Carlos was talking about for his app.

Creating a skybox in photoshop won't be easy. You could create a panoramic sky scene 4:1 ratio and make sure that it tiled seamlessly horizontally. I have no clue as to how one would go about manually creating the top of the skybox though, definitely beyond my artistic abilities!

Wow, I hadn't seen this before:

http://astronomy.swin.edu.au/~pbourke/terrain/tgs/

<edit: darn, don't see a DL link anywhere though...>

This was just posted at Garage Games, may be of some interest here:

http://www.pocorev.com/stl/