Cube Map Creation Toolkit (for rendering game environments)

  • February 27, 2016
  • 1,196 Downloads
  • 13 Likes
  • Blender 2.7x
  • Render: Cycles
  • Creator: Blendamental
  • License: CC-0
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Description:

This kit enables you to easily create skies for games or interactive web content. When a sky or environment texture needs to be displayed in real time, it is usually implemented as a cube map because of the performance advantages. Unfortunately, rendering directly to a cube map is not presently a feature of Cycles. Fortunately, with this kit you can easily create a cube map using any render engine in Blender, or from an existing environment map.

This kit uses two .blend files to create a cube map: a "Cube Cam" for rendering the tiles of your cube map, and a "Cube Map Compositor" for combining your six cube map tiles into one final image in the correct layout.

There are sample files included as well, so you can test it out right away, and better understand how it works. Try loading up the sample environment and rendering it! Documentation is included inside the .blend files. There is also an example .html file demonstrating a cube map applied in an interactive environment, created using Blend4Web.

Comments:

  • chabad360 profile picture
    chabad360

    how do you use this with a panorama, like the picture shows?

    Written March 02, 2016
  • Blendamental profile picture
    Blendamental

    Open "Cube Cam.blend" and see the section of the README text: "How to render a cube map from an existing environment map using this .blend file". The steps are explained there. Basically, in the .blend you will see an Environment Texture node that you can load your image into, and then render out the tiles of the cube map as a 6-frame animation. You can then use "Cube Map Compositor.blend" to combine these tiles into one image.

    Written March 04, 2016
  • chabad360 profile picture
    chabad360

    Thanks, but i figured it out the next day.

    Written March 06, 2016
  • sonance profile picture
    sonance

    Hint: Set the render samples to 1 and the tile size to 512x512, when you render the environment map only. It saves time on big renders.

    Written March 20, 2017
  • isnyder profile picture
    isnyder

    Thanks so much for this! I was about to create something like this on my own and luckily found yours first :D

    Written December 22, 2017
  • jazzroy profile picture
    jazzroy

    Thanks, it is really really useful!

    Written June 14, 2018
  • premiereboris profile picture
    premiereboris

    Hey, late to the party, but still thanks! It's awesome.

    Written October 09, 2018
  • reepodepot profile picture
    reepodepot

    Thank you, this makes making a cubemap super easy!

    Written February 22, 2021