CG Cookie
With custom sky textures, the sky's the limit.
Skyboxes have many names: HDRI's, World Environments, and Equirectangular Maps. They all do the same thing: Fill a 3D space with an infinite source of sky texture and world-based lighting.
Skyboxes are often the unsung hero of all 3D worlds, from video games to rendered animations to VR/AR. It's common to utilize free HDRI's from places like Polyhaven.com. These are convenient but limited.
Did you know you can create custom skyboxes with Blender? With custom skyboxes you can create any mood, time of day, and output whatever resolution you need!
❤️ CG Cookie, a project of Autotroph , contributes to Blender development through Autotroph’s Corporate Gold sponsorship of the Blender Development Fund. Your support of CG Cookie helps make this possible!
What you will Learn
By the end of this course, you will have a comprehensive understanding of:
- Purpose and anatomy of Skyboxes
- Blender's dynamic Sky Texture
- building a robust, volumetric Cloudscape Shader from scratch
- Rendering equirectangular cameras
- Fixing UV seam artifacts in rendered skybox textures
- Importing into the Godot game engine
Chapter 1: Intro to Skyboxes
We begin with the essentials: What is a Sky Box? What are they used for? What is equirectangular projection? Once we're on the same page about what we're creating, we can make it!
Chapter 2: Creating 3D Skies with Blender
There are two critical components to making a sky: Blender's dynamic Sky Texture, which covers the sun, light, and color hues. Second is clouds. We'll build a custom cloudscape shader to produce realistic, volumetric clouds with tons of controls.
Chapter 3: Cleanup & Import into Game Engine
Rendering equirectangular sky textures often results in noticeable discrepancies along seam lines. We'll correct those in Blender and then import the finished map into the Godot game engine.
About the Instructor
Chunck Trafagander is a Biome Artist at Mighty Canvas Inc. spending most of his days creating game assets. By night, he's an instructor teaching Blender, Instamat, and Substance. Check out his other courses for CG Cookie as well as his YouTube channel for more!
About CG Cookie Courses
All of our courses, including this one, are accessible to members of cgcookie.com. If you would like to convert this purchase to a CG Cookie subscription to unlock exercise feedback from instructors along with community access for questions and support, you can contact us at [email protected]. Please include your Superhive order ID and we will generate a coupon code to apply your purchase to a CG Cookie subscription.