Everyone likes free stuff, but as artists free stuff can be a real life saver. With this round of free stuff, we are including 6 sky panoramic textures. These textures are 4096×2048 and are licensed as CC Attribution 3.0. You are free to use them for just about any use. In commercial work and personal, just not allowed to redistribute or resell.
These images were created with Dreamscape from Afterworks, a 3D Studio Max Plugin. But don’t fret, these are .tgas and work great with Blender. 
Enjoy!
Download includes:
- six 4096×2058 .tga sky textures
CG Cookie Sky Textures by Wes Burke is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.
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11 Comments
Many thanks for these!! They will certainly come in handy in the near future.
Also just wanted to quickly say a huge thank you for all the hard work you guys do here. This really is a fantastic site!! Thanks again!!
I was just building skydomes tonite:) Really nice images, much appreciation for that treat!..Hope everyone at blendercookie had a nice Halloween and eventually had a HDR-dance party:)
Best wishes and regards from Berlin.
These look great! I’m not sure how to use these, any thoughts on a tip/tutorial on this?
Usualy u can use them as a skybox or skydome.
I’m not so familiar with the boxes but i learnt how to make a dome so i try to repeat what i learned. Take any of the skies u like into a photo editing program (i use gimp so i explain how to do it in gimp):
load the image into the gimp with open file u’ll see a broad image strip,
go to the filters tab->distort (or distortion..i have german version so can’t check back on the correct spelling)
in distort dropdown choose -> polar coordinates, you’ll see a preview of a circular image, hit okay
since the image is now circular and not filling the whole space,
use the rectangular selection tool and select the area with the sky circle,
double click on the rect.selection tool to bring up the tool properties,
u can scroll down there and you can make your selection perfectly square in the size/res slider, (in this case i think 2048×2048 is about whats right)
go to ->image tab choose -> crop to selection to crop your image,
save the image as a new file.
thats it for the gimp..you might want to correct colors or gamma or use any filters but thats up to you.
back to blender:
spawn a uv sphere and delete the lower half of it in edit mode, open the uv image editor, select all faces and hit ‘U’ to unwrap,
load up your new texture in the image window so u can see the uv layout on top of your img, go to materials tab and assign a material with an image texture of your circular sky, chose ‘uv’ in ‘map input’ panel for that texture,
check your result in textured mode, you should see the outside of the dome with a sky, if it is distorted alot consider to scale up the uv’s from the center vertex with proportional editing (big size so most of the uv rings are affected) scale the whole uv down if u exceed the edges of the picture from scaling..anyway play around with scaling uvs til u feel the sky looks good:) (u can also care for that after the next step or at any time later)
since the sky only appears on the outside of the dome u gotta go to the editing panel (F9),in the buttons tab with multires, UV-calculation and texture face go to the texture face buttons and choose 2 sided, this only affects the active face so select all verts of the sphere and hit the copy button in the texture face panel, this will apply twoside to all faces,
then u should have a skydome..still u could tweak alot, make it bit transparent etc. or get high dynamic range effect and so on but this would take too much space here,
i don’t guarantee that this is the best way to make a skydome but its working for me and i didnt dare to link to other tutorial sites here in case theres some sort of concurrency among those…i learnt this from a great guy called roberto R.(kudos):)
woah ..sorry Wes this text got so long ..it seemed less huge in the posting window..delete if necessary
Hah – thanks for the detailed response. Nothing some coffee can’t handle to get you through. Good stuff and thank you for taking the time.
Cheers,
W
it’s been a pleasure:)
..thx again for the skies and all the effort u put into this!
Downloads doesn’t work for me here in Brazil. Please, someone send me in private e-mail: leebano@gmail.com
Thanks!
Thanks Tons.
Sound like a noob when I ask this.
But how do I use them in my rendering?
I tend to use Photoshop for my backgrounds (Render from blender as PNG without background)
if u just want to use them as a simple backdrop, u can apply them as a texture to the world.
Shading panel(F5)-> world button->texture tab ‘add New’–>texture buttons (F6)
->Type ‘Image’->click load and load the desired texture
if u map em onto a plane, just do the same but select the plane add a material and then an image texure to that one
Thanks for taking precious time to create this. It’s challenging to get something both free as well as high quality similar to this post.