I've got a question, which seems difficult for me, but I post it here, because I think most of you have much more experience than I have.
Question:
Is there any tool (freeware ) to create textures for a skybox
from a photo?
(please don't send me to google, I spent 2 hours searching...)
Simply cutting the photo into different parts doesn't work. The skybox will look like a inside-textured cube, even when seamless. Is there any good
i always thought a skybox is an inside-textured cube without lighting. maybe turning off lighting does help to make it look seamless? i dont understand why it looks like an inside-textured cube when you make it completely seamless without seeing that you cutted it.
if you search for tools, try terragen. you cant make skybox-images from your own images, but you can render new ones.
i personally hate skyboxes (at least with a background on them), but terragen-rendered skybox-images without the terrain on it actually do look _very_ nice and high detailed
or you make your own sky/weather system which will sure look kick-ass (im going to implement something like this soon in my project, maybe i can share some code when the class is usable & looks good)
after all I think I have to "play around" with photoshop then.
When I have a look at all the six textures laying side by side, I can see they are some kind of "streched" and this effect won't be easy to create.
Perhaps I should set up a sphere in 3dsmax, inside-texture it and try to "unwrap" it to a new bitmap. (learning by doing is the best).
A sky-"hemi-sphere" would solve this, but there surely ain't one.
But, anyway, this is only for the sky, I do not want to put my scene into an endless "cage". But i imagine in further future, I will like to see moving clouds on it (dark ambience, fast moving, birds (raven) on it).
I found a program on sourceforge a long time ago, (don't have it anymore and don't recall the name) that too pics you gave it and made them into a skybox for you. It would make the pics seamless so that when you applied them in your app, they looked correct. it worked great, but I only used it once, then when I moved computers, forgot about it.
If it exists in the real world, it can be created in 3d
I know (and have) terragen, a wonderful thing to create photorealistic landscapes, but I wanted to use a photo for this, I would like to build my own home(-town) for example.
It works great. Just make sure your photos have a fair bit of overlap and some detail on every pic (overcast and pure blue skies don't work the greatest) but it will match them together perfectly. Once you've got that, use HDRShop http://gl.ict.usc.edu/HDRShop/ and use the panoramic transformation to change it from the spherical projection to a vertical cross. Then chop that up into your 6 sides.
This pipeline has worked great for me
P.s. I don't think either of these tools will let you do commercial production. HDR shop can be purchased for that. You'll have to check them out for the full details.
yea, that's what it is like, no Mipmapping, But in fact the 6 pics won't fit properly, when laying side by side. This is I don't know the english words, sorry, a kind of perspectively distortion, to give you the impress of seamless 3d in a skybox. The software mentioned above is pretty good to create custom skybox.
Anyway, I tested around, discovered the skybox, and I can not say this is the ultimate way for background and horizon "matte paintings".
Surely much better would be a sky-hemisphere.
And I surely will set an animated sky to my scene, where clouds are moving or birds, for example.
This would be a task to create a customized SceneNode(R).
I will do so next days and will post the results.
Panorama tools from some german math prof have by far the best autostitch algorithm. It was entirely open-source until a greedy company came and tried to sue him for his own work. To avoid cost he pulled the source of the core but the tools are still very usable. If you rub your eyes a little bit you might still be able to....
) to create textures for a 
