skies and env

I would like to know what you think is best, or even best, if you have better ideas and links.

For filling the world I actually use sky boxes. But I’ve heard (and already tested it quickly) of sky domes. What would you suggest ?
I’ve seen in some places that sky domes look bettter. It might be true, but I guess we should make a very big sky dome because my tests ended with a so bad looking thing. Then the world geometry must fit well so that we can’t see bad ‘drawings’: domes can be too spherical in looking.

Also, for filling a bit this thread, I actually use 6 textures for my sky box. But the textures I get don’t fit well in the edges. Do you suggest a big texture for all ‘adjacent’ faces (I mean faces of a same high sharing an edge), so a NPOT texture , then having only 3 textures (with that way I could use strip to draw) ?

This is because I’m actually not satisfied with that box.

Finally, how easy (or hard) it is to make sky boxes (and sky domes) look more realistic ? I mean specially animate the clouds (maybe within GLSL). Should I adopt a different way ?

There’s almost no difference between a skydome and skybox if you draw them correctly positioned around the eye.

You want to draw something that is effectively ‘infinitely’ distant and maybe augment it with a few closer phenomenon like layered clouds, it doesn’t really call for a great intellectual effort to decide on an approach.

I’m moving this to the beginner’s forum.

I’ve found that domes can have certain advantages over cubes in that certain gradient and layered cloud effects are easier. Personally I don’t care much for cubes, or more specifically, static images (not that dynamic cubes are impossible).

Cheers,

Also texture imposters and 3D cloud techniques are increasingly common these days. I think vterrain has a few papers and demos in this area.

Cheers.