Hello,
I have a little project that I'm prototyping at the moment using JME what I'm trying to aim for is a space scene that you can move around and free look where you want.
So far I have a sky box nicely working with a random star field image I found on the net as a texture, but due to it not tiling correctly it doesn't look so good :)
I was just wondering what the best/recommended way of creating a space background is? I know that you need six textures that fit together but how do you generate them and deal with the distortion as the camera moves around?
Cheers,
Reiker.
EDIT: typos
What distortion as the camera moves around?
it just seems (althoug it could be my textures) that when you are looking in the corners the 'stars' distort as you are seeing them at a different angle, they kinda elongate.
yepp, it's your texture 
the relative position from camera to skybox does not change.
You need a set of textures that are each a square, 90 degree FOV from the same point, facing north, east, west, south, up and down. You can render something like that in blender, or a landscape modelling package. If you have really good starfield images covering the full 360 degrees, with enough fiddling and checking the FOV of the images you should be able to get them aligned, at which point they should look fine. It would probably be much easier to fake this with a render though, many packages will do starfields, and you could add nebulae etc. by putting planes around the viewer, facing them, with stuff from say Hubble. Or you could have the planes inside jme, as billboard sprites that move with the camera, which would be more efficient since you could have much higher res nebulae scattered around, without having to have that high resolution everywhere on the skybox. Although you will need high res for "point" stars as well; you might be better off doing that via sprites or points, and just using the skybox for broader areas of colour, larger nebulae etc. Or something
So basically the options are to set up a scene in blender and render in 90 deg segments to get the 6 textures for the inside of the cube. Or to set up the background with in the jME scene graph (I was kinda thinking about this as an alternative my self) or use a mixture of the above.
I can see that this could take some fiddling to get the look I want :)