Skybox Size Question

Graphics
1

Hi, I’ve been learning Unity for several months now and believe that I’ve learned a lot because of my dedicated pursuit of trying to understand not only how things are done, but why they’re done.

I’ve also been working with skyboxes lately and have a question. - It’s my understanding that a skybox is infinite. Hence you can never travel beyond the limits of a skybox. However, in reality, a skybox is nothing more than what it’s name implies…a big box that surrounds your world. So, if I can never travel beyond the limits of my skybox, does the skybox move in sync with my camera even when its not attached to the camera? Or could I actually travel beyond its limits if I add my skybox to the Render Settings in a multi-camera set up.

I would imagine that if I had a character controller, with the skybox NOT attached to its camera, and I starts at one end of the skybox and travel to the far end of the skybox, I would eventually reach the other side…would that actually be possible or is there more to the skybox that I am not seeing.

The same thing applies when your character controller falls through your ground plane. It will fall forever…why doesn’t it then go through the bottom image of the skybox?

Thanks for helping me understand the mechanics of why skyboxes work the way they do.
Calixto

2

You can’t travel beyond the limits of a skybox since there aren’t any; it’s not a game object that exists in the scene that you could travel through or beyond. It’s just something that’s rendered behind everything else. You could think of it as a second camera that’s sitting stationary inside a cube.

–Eric

3

maybe also interesting to know, i remember from Unreal Tournament that is -exactly- how they used to make their skyboxes, in a remote location in the map there was a second camera set-up which took the images of the skybox, which were then projected on the outer layer of the player’s world by having those camera’s always face the same direction, and whatever ended up detected in the main camera as “blank sky” got replaced with this image from the other camera!

4

Yeah, that’s a 3D Skybox. You can also do that in Unity. You can place a camera in a remote location that mimics the rotation of the player’s camera and you’re done. You just have to set it to be on the lowest layer so it renders before anything else.