Skybox horizon adjustment

Questions & Answers
1

I have a situation where there is a cliff you can look off over the ocean. When you look across the water down at the ocean level it aligns with the skybox horizon just fine and looks realistic.

When you look from the top of the cliff you can see below the horizon of the skybox and it looses all realism. The player will never be down near the edge of the water so I just need to adjust the horizon down a bit. so that it looks correct from the cliff.

Is there a way to shift or tilt the skybox to move the horizon down? I know in Maya there is an adjustment for that but I haven’t been able to find anything similar in Unity.

2

The way I see it, you have three options:

1. Add fog

To me, it appears that the easiest way of dealing with this is to add fog to hide your Skybox’s “underbelly”. The Global Fog Package is a standard asset and quite powerful! Here is how it goes:

  1. Add the “Effects” standard package.
  2. Download this Extended Global Fog script and copy it into your folder (to enable more customization options). Note that the author posted multiple versions through-out the thread to fix bugs reported by others. Very helpful fella!
  3. Add the GlobalFog script component to your camera.
  4. Make sure to enable “Affect Sky Box”!
  5. Global fog uses the color and other settings defined under Windows → Lighting → Fog.
  6. However, as explained here, enabling Unity-standard fog causes a hell lot of bugs when used in conjunction with the extended fog script. So what you want to do is: (1) enable fog, (2) make the changes, (3) disable standard fog again.
  7. You are done! Fine-tune to your liking. :slight_smile:

2. Custom Skybox texture/material

Unity’s Skybox is defined by a material applied to a tessellated sphere or box; so you can just make some adjustments to your Skybox texture, and move down or otherwise eliminate it’s “horizon” using Photoshop, Gimp, Blender etc.

3. Roll your own Skybox shader.

3

I know this is a bit late but for anyone else that sees this:
If you use the Mobile Skybox shader you can add Y offset to all the textures.
It will screw up the skybox top a little bit but if seeing the bottom (eg looking down from aeroplan)
is a priority it shouldn’t matter.

4

Again, it’s late, but, probably, it can be useful for somebody: I created custom skybox shader with vertical scale/offset feature, and HSV controls for simple coloring and reuse skybox textures: