Dynamically generate Sky map

[Penny]

Hi,

I am trying to find the best way to dynamically generate a sky map.

I have looked at several related topics but the links on them are broken…

Texture-mapping different images to faces of a cube

Hi fellas. I'm using jME 3, jMonkeyPlatform, latest SVN version. I would like to texture-map a cube so that each face of the cube will be textured with a different image. I tried to do so using the TextureCubeMap object as follows: Image negx = assetManager.loadTexture("Textures/1.jpg").getImage(); Image posx = assetManager.loadTexture("Textures/2.jpg").getImage(); Image negy = assetManager.loadTexture("Textures/3.jpg").getImage(); Image posy = assetManager.loadTexture("Textur…

Dynamic Skybox

Or you can fake it like I do. A simple quad with a texture of some clouds where you can see through to the sky colour (background colour of scene) behind and then animate the texture across the quad by modifying the texture coords of the quad. You can put e.g. two layers of these on top to get two cloud layers going (even with different movement directions if that is your fancy). Finally you can then have a stars quad that fades in when night arrives. The only problem with this is how to ge…

What I am trying to acheive…

I have created a sky scene. The sky scene changes but not to a degree that it requires rendering every frame so I had an idea of rendering the sky scene to a texture cube map at a much lower frequency as an optimization and to use that on a sky box.

I have been trying to find some examples of rendering a scene to a skybox, ie 6 renders to 6 framebuffers and using the textures to map the texture cube. This would make a great saving if for example the sky scene was rendered once every second or less.

Is using a texture cube map the way to go or is there a better way? Looking at the examples I have they only load the texture cube map from a dds file. It also looks like the texture cube map helper only accepts images instead of textures.

Maybe creating my own skybox and material that uses a texture array to reduce texture states would be the answer?

Also, would producing 6 scene renders create a seemless panarama? Does anyone know what are the ideal camera settings for this?

Are there any examples which demostrate what I am trying to achieve?

You help and guidance on this is greatly appreciated
Penny