[i really dont know how to write tutorials so.. if you find some info from here usefull.. excelent
]
first you need to take some photos of some open space [i took mine from a hill where i live]. take as many photos as you can so you will be able to make nice panoramic image from them. dont forget to take photos of top and bottom.. as much as you can.. taking care of correct exposure will help you later in compositing them together..
ok.. now your home with 50 photos! now you need to put them together into something that looks like this image
keep resolution as high as possible and proportions to 4X3. middle row will become your forward back left and right images. take care of the left and right edges.. in photoshop use FILTER>OTHER>OFFSET.. and shith image horizontaly.. you will see vertical line and here comes the hard part cause now you need to paint that edge so that your image will be tileable.. use clone tool, heal brush or parts of some other images to cover that edge. [you can of course use some proggie for stitching panoramic images but i did mine by hand]
now go to HDR Shop page http://www.ict.usc.edu/graphics/HDRShop/ and download HDRShop v1.0 [v1 is free ,v2 is not but v1 is excelent program anyway]. download and install it.
now in HDR Shop open your panoramic image and go to IMAGE>PANORAMA>PANORAMIC TRANSFORMATIONS..
and set source image format to Cubic environment (6 seperate images) and your destination image format to Cubic environment (vertical cross).. set size of destination image to 3X4 of your desired resolution.. so if you want your skybox images to be 1024x1024 set image size to 3072X4096 and hit ok
and you will get something like this (without lines and text of course
now you need to paint top and down parts of image.. for top use some clouds image from straight up.. when painting up and down images take care that you dont paint over the edges cause otherwise your images will not tile properly.. it is best to copy image of some clouds on new layer and then with soft earser just erase soft edge (like soft circle whith wich you cover that ugly seam on top).. in my case i just painted it by hand cause i didnt have any clouds..
now all you need to do is cut this image into squares and save them as targas.. it helps to turn on grid in photoshop and set your grid to be 1024 pixels and then turn on VIEW>SNAP.. then your crop tool will snap to 1024x1024 grid and you will get perfect squares.
thats it! hope you will find some info from here usefull.. then find new creative ways to use it..
here are my skybox images [wich are not at all perfect.. i know.. but i did it quickly and just for this tutorial so.. dont complain about that little blur on that mountain far away..]
and ingame shots of my skybox..
c ya!