Tool for painting skyboxes?

I wonder if any of you know a good tool for painting seamless skybox textures. Especially plugins compatible with Photoshop CS4 (yay!) would be awesome.

I know about skypaint, but the tool is really a pain to even get to work nowadays. There must be some alternative? What would Valve use to do the TF2 skies, for example?

PS: I know about Terragen. My question is about editing and tuning the resulting images while still keeping the correct perspectives.

You can try following Aaron's Seamless Texture Creation Tutorial maybe? It's a very nice tutorial

(No I don't know if that also works well for skyboxes, but it's worth trying out I guess)

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Youtube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/Nibgames

The trick is to get the perspective distortion right, which goes a few steps further. For example, if you just copy in a photo of a cloud, it will look like it's a sticker on a flat wall.

That's what the tutorial is for. http://www.snarkpit.net/snarkpower/articles/game/cat/pn/tp/196/Seamless_Texture_Creation

Or are you talking about the skybox part where it goes from left to front and from front to up\down\right etc?

lol sorry I'm not the smartest one here

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Youtube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/Nibgames

Thanks Niborius although reaper47 is talking about making a 2D skybox (yes the left/right/up/down/back/front thing) so this tutorial isn't much use.

I'd also like to know more about 2d skybox creation.

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Aaron's Stuff

Oh I see.

Well then I know nothing about those, though you can make a panorama picture and make it a skybox.

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Youtube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/Nibgames

Generally Terragen, even the free version, can do pretty much anything you want when it comes to natural looking landscapes and clouds. Check out the tutorial I linked in the first post.

But I recently tried to copy a picture of the moon into a rather simple night sky and it was a royal pain in the ass. It's a perfect circle, but unless you plant it into the middle of one of the six sides (which you mostly don't want to do), it will look slightly distorted/oval, but enough to look really bad for something as prominent as the sky. Oddly enough even adding stars (dots!!!) looks bad and flat!

I find it pretty strange that there are no plugins for this. I searched teh googel, and only found a few super-complicated conversion tutorials, but no actual tool to "paint in perspective". The whole QuicktimeVR scene should have spawned something useful, but it's really, really hard to find.

Hi reaper, I went thru exactly that while making a night sky w/ a moon. I ended up having to get it close by trial and error in PS. It was for a night version of Shipshape, I got it to the point where it would be circular if you looked straight at it. I posted some screens but they got lost on the site recently.

There really was no way I could find to eliminate the FOV distortion completely short of making a sprite for use with emv_sun, which tbh I didnt try... Let me know if you want to check it out for fun.

I made a moon.. and quite effective one too.. maybe look at some of my stuff and DL it and see how it's done Hayfaker.