SkyDome

Does anyone have a Skydome tutorial or know where I could find one?

I can get a 360degree panoramic digital photo of a cityscape that I plan to use for my skydome.
Or do I just need a photo of my 4 views i.e. North, south, east and west.

Note, I am a newbie and I have already checked previous post on the subject but did not find a step by stem tutorial.

You can use the World settings for applying a sky texture.

I use this method quite a bit.

In Top view, Add>Mesh>UVsphere, remove the bottom half of the verts, select all then hit W key and Flip normals so they point inside the sphere. Leave edit mode and scale the half sphere so it now encloses all of your scene. Set smooth, got to material buttons.

Add new material, click shadless button, add new texture to the material, load in your 360’ photo image (do a search in google for HDRI images if you need some, but you will need to convert these to jpeg or similar to use them in Blender.)

Go back to texture buttons in material buttons, hit Sphere for Map input and let texture affect Emit value. You can also turn off traceable and shadow buttons to spot any unwanted shadows appearing.

To do the same using the world buttons. Add new world, turn on real only. Add new texture and load image, click Hori and Zen up.

World skydomes tend to cause jagged edges in the image unless you use huge resolution image files, the sphere skydome is more forgiving.

Hope this helps,

Sonix.

I have some models you can use which include lighting and skydomes that you can apply textures to.

http://www.katorlegaz.com/blendertips/models.html

Sonix has a good setup for using image maps. If you want to do a procedural sky, I recommend using just the top 1/10 or so of the sphere (make sure you still have enough faces), with the edge of the bottom ring dropped just below your ground’s horizon. This gives a better approximation of what the sky really does over our heads and within our range of vision, and therefore gives you that nice, denser look toward the horizon.

Thanks Sonix
I finally got it to work.

However the bottom of my sky.jpg file has a cityscape that does not show up in my rendered view.
I suspect I need to change my setting involving scale or offset. As a newbie with limited knowledge in blender, I tried different combinations with no luck.

Also using the walkthrough_template.blend file when I go to the game engine “P” key, all my texture turn white.

Somehow my worldmap is rotated how do i rotate it back?