Good work…very nice…thanks for the maps… I wish id seen this yesterday…spent 6 hours trying to paint photo realistic skymaps by hand got pretty good tho…but nothing like this !!! Thanks M@dcow.
Glad you found them useful…but you are definitely on the right track making your own, it’s a good practice all round, I’d say.
Hey, if you get some good results and want to contribute, e-mail me with your skymaps and I’ll put them up here, the same goes with everyone else.
Cheers.
I will do that…Any ideas on what is a good resolution everyone will be able to use tho ?? Im still not sure myself what is the best for import as blender skymaps. If u happen to know…lemme know. Thanks.
VERY COOL!
Under wich license terms are we allowed to use your work?
And could you write a howto on skymap generation? Which software do you use?
Well I have “The Gimp”…if thats what u mean… I prolly could write up something… need to simpify the system tho… licensing … hmmm…dont know much about that stuff…
What program did you use to create these skymaps… I’d like to make some 
Bluespider: I think panzi was probably talking to me. Since you haven’t actually put any maps online then it’s doubtful that he would be asking about license terms. 
Panzi: License?..Well…as far as Im concerned you can use these maps for whatever you want…meaning commercial work too…the only thing I don’t want is for someone to sell them to make a profit…now that REALLY would cheese me off 
What program did you use to create these skymaps… I’d like to make some
Terragen and vue d’esprit. Also I used respam to generate the spherical mapping.
Excuse me for being so, uhm, un knowing but…
How would I use any of the spherical mapped images? It seems as some of the cooler ones are spherical instead of like the other ones…
Other question:
Is it possible to make a skymap with blender? If it’s possible, how?
Ooops, seems I have been really busy lately so I haven’t read your explanation before. Thanks a lot, it really helped me, the texture seems only a little stretched, but I think I can tweak this accordingly.
Again, thanks a lot M@dcow
You can use HDRShop http://www.debevec.org/HDRShop/, which also handles hdr images you need to make a vertical cross image first, then convert it.
Is there an example cross file as to get the coordinates right?
A simpler alternative is to use a program called respam. I found an old and very brief explanation on how to create your own:
First things first…you need to create a panoramic image, now there are many different techniques you can use to go about this but I will focus on showing you how to create a CGI angularmap using only free tools (that’s right, we are all cheapskates)
Step1. Get hold of a copy of Terragen (sorry Linux users )
Essentially, what we are aiming to create here is a skybox, which means six renders of your terragen scene taken from the front, back, top, bottom, right and left…this will create a seamless skybox which we will later convert to a panoramic image.
Important settings are:
-
camera zoom settings must be set at 1 (creating the required 90 degree field of view)
-
exposure / light settings are best set at 1 (for vibrant images)
-
the rendered image must be square. The maximum square resolution you can get with the free version of terragen is 960x960, so I’d suggest using this resolution.
that’s it. render out each of the six views or use a script to do it for you. one can be found here:
http://www.thomascreek.com/tg/tgpano.htm
Once you have the six views rendered out, you can close terragen down.
*convertion of cubic environment to spherical environment
There is a very useful program called Respam that will do the convertions for you…only problem is that it is in german!
Don’t let that worry you, only an idiot will be unable to figure out how to use it
Link: http://respam.terratalk.de/
It’s the file that says “download” at the very top. Open it up load your six images in and hit the button to convert the images into the required format (you can’t miss it)
Save the image and that’s it.
**spherical to angularmap convertion
Hdr shop is an essential tool for creating angularmaps, you can find it here:
http://www.debevec.org/HDRShop/
I won’t go into the details of how to convert it to an angularmap because there is a tutorial on the site that will help:
M@dcow: yeah! you finally broke down! lol, great german program btw! now for the explosion of new skymaps to add to this already great sticky! peace and god bless…
I had already made several cubes from Terragen for use with cubes and Spheres in Blender. I noticed my cubes don’t map well to the cross within the respam utilty. The map incorrectly because they map as a vertal cross not a horizontal… Oh well, i’ll play with it some more. thanks for the tips. too bad no Mac versions of this stuff.
Could someone create an anglemap with HDRShop if I e-mail them a sky cross? BTW, your welcome to keep it as well. It’s a very nice mountain scene. I won’t have access to a Windows machine till tuesday.
the respam utility turns your image to lat/long not cross, you could go to cross in hdrshop though.
masterhoshi’s sky map!
and a 3000x3000 png version(8mb), hopefully you can deal with that masterhoshi!
http://www.eaemedia.com/blender/CitySkyCubeAngular.png
again, no promises how long this will be here but i’ll try to keep it up as long as possible!
Fantastic! Thankyou. I’ll give it a try!