Need Advice on Custom Skyboxes

Unity Engine
1

Im looking for a way to create skyboxes with this kind of look:

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1213680--49467--$8687c4b2ce931ef57523249d43ecad22-d49pp79.jpg500×628 54.2 KB

I am not really sure where to start or how to approach this. I can’t just paint it right? As I would need to paint in the perspective. I don’t think I am capable of doing that. I am pretty sure I can paint that kind of 2D image, but how to translate that to a skybox?

Any suggestions would help, thanks!

2

Skyboxes in Unity are made out of 6 square textures that create a cube (front, left, back, right, top, bottom). It’s pretty easy to paint the horizontal tiles, and the bottom one is usually very close to a solid color. The top can be tricky to conceptualize depending on what you do but you should be able to do this fairly intuitively.

Alternatively, instead of using a Unity skybox, you can create your own skydome. This would be a hemispherical mesh that you import into Unity.

How to make a skydome:

  1. Create a hemisphere in your modeling package and UV map it from the top down (so that you see a circle in your UV space, not a grid with sawtooth top)
  2. Invert the normals of this hemisphere. Otherwise, when you load it into unity, it will be invisible unless you are outside of it, which is the opposite of what you want for a skydome.
  3. Create an image in photoshop (or gimp) that is of panoramic proportions. Try 2048 x 512. Paint your sky. (Don’t include those light rays if you have access to Pro with ImageEffects, as you can do this with post processing instead.)
  4. Resize your image to 512x512 (or 1024x1024, just make it square).
  5. Run filter > Distort > Polar Coordinates (this is in Photoshop, Gimp must have an equivalent).
  6. Save this texture to your assets directory.
  7. Place your dome mesh in your scene and scale it up to encompass your scene as needed.
  8. Create a material (unlit) using your texture and apply it to your dome.

Bonus: Create a separate layer for just the clouds. Duplicate your dome mesh, scale it down slightly, and place a separate material with just the clouds (in transparent cutout mode) on this smaller dome. Animate it to rotate slowly. Moving clouds!

You can achieve a similar effect with a shader but this is how I’d do it if I was just an artist and was afraid of code.

3

Thanks Ill look into this! I am not a complete noob and have made skydomes in max before … the polar coordinates step is I think what will make it work! Thanks!