Skybox?

I’m trying to do a skybox this time (not a skydome). I spent 7hrs rendering a terragen scene, then whipped it together in blender (no pun intended ) and it looks like absolute rubbish in panda3d…

I had the same problem with skydomes… Is there some trick you have to utilise to get skyboxes/domes to look good? All I can think of is that mipmapping/mag/min filters or something like that is distorting the original texture quality… I know that the model is correct, as I can test it in pview/blender and it’s right…

Here’s my skybox code…

# Load the skybox
self.skybox = loader.loadModel("skybox/skybox")
self.skybox.setScale(2000)
self.skybox.reparentTo(render)
self.skybox.setShaderOff()
self.skybox.setBin('background', 0)
self.skybox.setDepthWrite(0)
self.skybox.setLightOff()

I also reposition the skybox to the camera’s pos every frame…

Here are two photos (hosted at flickr), one from the original skybox, and one from inside panda3D. My window is at 800x600, if that’s relevant…

Original skybox picture

960×960

Panda3D screenshot

799×575

Any suggestions about why it looks so bad? Thanks a ton

Hmm, a guess would be that the texture isn’t a power-of-two size, and panda rescales it down to a size that is actually a power of two.

Otherwise you can try disabling texture filtering and see if that helps.

Between your pictures A and B, it is clear that B represents a very highly zoomed-in detail on A. Is that not what you intended? Because A is clearly a very wide-angle view of a sky, but it’s not a 360-degree view of the sky; it looks more like about 90 or 100 degrees to me. If you then take that image and wrap it around a 360-degree dome, you’re certainly going to zoom it in a whole bunch.

David

hmmm. thanks pro-rsoft and drwr. Yes, pro-rsoft, they weren’t powers of 2, someone on IRC suggested that (can’t remember who, but thankyou ) and that helped. They still aren’t great though.

@drwr, yeah, the terragen image is at 90. I think what you said may have something to do with it… Not sure how to fix it yet though.

Thanks both