[Herra Tohtori]

Eagle-Nebula.7z

[Droid803]

Where do you get these background :O

[Angelus]

Thanks Herra!

[Herra Tohtori]

Where do you get these background :O

HST aka Hubble Space Telescope.

From that gallery, you pick the "Full-Resolution images" option which will, in this case, take you to Hubblesite.org which has mega huge pictures for most of the stuff. In this case, source image was a 3857 x 7804 TIFF file.

There are a lot bigger pictures available, such as Eta Carinae Nebula which has a 29566 x 14321 TIFF file available...


Once I find a suitable source image it's just a matter of editing it in GIMP to produce a spherical texture, which I then use in Blender to produce six-sided skybox texture renders.

[Nyctaeus]

This is just f***ing amazing! Thank you, Master!

[Rodo]

wow, amazing stuff!

edit: and thanks for the script, it's truly a life jacket.

[FreeSpaceFreak]

Glad to see it being put to good use

[fightermedic]

As mentioned above, it takes quite a bit of pixel-perfect placement to make this work. And those who get to make a fair few of these, know how time-consuming the job can be. So I made a GIMP script that does it for you.

Installation
1. Unzip the script into C:\Documents and Settings\<username>\.gimp-<version>\scripts
2. In GIMP, click Filters > Script-Fu > Refresh scripts
3. The script will now show up as "Envmap to skybox" in the Filters > Map menu.

Required input

• Place your faces in the following way (it's the Blender envmap layout).
  
  
  
  
• Recommended input resolutions are 6120x4080 (for 2048^2 maps) or 12240x8160 (for 4096^2 maps)
• Merge all your layers into one (Ctrl-M)
• Make sure your picture size fits your layer (Image > Fit Canvas to Layers)
• Your image should be in RGB mode (Image > Mode > RGB)

What will happen
The script will ask you where and under what filename you want to save the faces. They're saved automatically as PNG, DON'T give the filename an extension!
The saved images will merge seamlessly when used with the skybox in OP.

MediaFire download: version 1.2, Oct. 21 2011 (3kB)

you are the awesome man of the second!!! aaaaah forget it, of the minute even!

[Cyborg17]

This is awesome. I've been able to use it already.  But there's one problem.... if you wanted your generic seamless skybox to have a submodel as a part of it, since Geometry import apparently does not carry over textures in PCS2, you'd be unable to add them.  Could you post the original max or blender file you made?

[mjn.mixael]

Wut.

Just export the skybox as a .dae and use that...

[Cyborg17]

Last time I tried that, it broke the UV map.  How do I avoid that if I only have access to blender?

[mjn.mixael]

A properly installed and upgrade PCS2 and Blender will not break UV maps for that process.. I do it very often.

[Cyborg17]

Ok, so I think I found my error.  Turns out everything was properly installed, but I never added a texture onto the model after import.  Rookie mistake. 

Sorry for the trouble guys.

[FreeSpaceFreak]

So... It has come to my attention (thanks Herra!) that the seamless-skybox script no longer worked on newer versions of the GIMP. Turns out one of the functions that the script used has been deprecated etc. This should be fixed in version 1.3 of the script, hopefully enabling easy seamless skyboxes for many years to come!

Release post repeated below for convenience:

As mentioned above, it takes quite a bit of pixel-perfect placement to make this work. And those who get to make a fair few of these, know how time-consuming the job can be. So I made a GIMP script that does it for you.

Installation
1. Unzip the script into C:\Documents and Settings\<username>\.gimp-<version>\scripts
2. In GIMP, click Filters > Script-Fu > Refresh scripts
3. The script will now show up as "Envmap to skybox" in the Filters > Map menu.

Required input

• Place your faces in the following way (it's the Blender envmap layout).
  
  
  
  
• Recommended input resolutions are 6120x4080 (for 2048^2 maps) or 12240x8160 (for 4096^2 maps)
• Merge all your layers into one (Ctrl-M)
• Make sure your picture size fits your layer (Image > Fit Canvas to Layers)
• Your image should be in RGB mode (Image > Mode > RGB)

What will happen
The script will ask you where and under what filename you want to save the faces. They're saved automatically as PNG, DON'T give the filename an extension!
The saved images will merge seamlessly when used with the skybox in OP.

MediaFire download: version 1.3, January 2016 (3kB)

[Herra Tohtori]

I needed to reacquire the envmap to skybox script, and noticed the image in the post quoted below didn't work (something in Wikimedia's linking had changed). Fixing for the sake of documentation.

As mentioned above, it takes quite a bit of pixel-perfect placement to make this work. And those who get to make a fair few of these, know how time-consuming the job can be. So I made a GIMP script that does it for you.

Installation
1. Unzip the script into C:\Documents and Settings\<username>\.gimp-<version>\scripts
2. In GIMP, click Filters > Script-Fu > Refresh scripts
3. The script will now show up as "Envmap to skybox" in the Filters > Map menu.

Required input

• Place your faces in the following way (it's the Blender envmap layout).
  
  
  
  
  
• Recommended input resolutions are 6120x4080 (for 2048^2 maps) or 12240x8160 (for 4096^2 maps)
• Merge all your layers into one (Ctrl-M)
• Make sure your picture size fits your layer (Image > Fit Canvas to Layers)
• Your image should be in RGB mode (Image > Mode > RGB)

What will happen
The script will ask you where and under what filename you want to save the faces. They're saved automatically as PNG, DON'T give the filename an extension!
The saved images will merge seamlessly when used with the skybox in OP.

MediaFire download: version 1.3, January 2016 (3kB)