Help with skybox pictures

[seth]

I'm making a banner for a website a friend is designing for me. It's going to be a cityscape-style banner. I would love to have a skybox as the background, but in order to maintain the high res quality of the image, it must be a really big picture. I thought maybe I could try taking several pictures sequentially in SFM of the skybox like a panorama and then stitching them together in Photoshop to keep it high quality, but I don't think that's possible as there would be a lot of visible clipping in the way and it wouldn't be orthogonal looking.

Does anyone have any ideas for getting some high res pictures of the skybox? It's sky_stormfront_01 if anyone's wondering. Is making a map with just the skybox an option?

Here's the banner I have so far.

Thanks!
Sevin

 

[Freyja]

The skybox itself is like 2048x2048 per side. I'd just extract them from the vpk and just put them together in photoshop.

 

[seth]

The skybox itself is like 2048x2048 per side. I'd just extract them from the vpk and just put them together in photoshop.

Oh yes I forgot about extracting them. Thanks Aly!

 

[seth]

Ok I tried extracting the textures from the textures directory but it seems that the textures are only 400x400. Is there any other place I can extract? It was from textures_dir -> materials -> skybox -> vtf files.

 

[Freyja]

Here you go. Not sure why they were only 400x400 for you, but to save you the trouble I just extracted them from my directory and stitched them together for you.

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/2347130/misc/sky_stormfront_panorama.png

 

[seth]

Here you go. Not sure why they were only 400x400 for you, but to save you the trouble I just extracted them from my directory and stitched them together for you.

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/2347130/misc/sky_stormfront_panorama.png

I really appreciate that, but I wasn't on my computer then and it seemed to be 400x400 when I viewed it. I stitched them together myself just now, but they're only 1024x1024 now, which is still not good enough unfortunately. I really needed them to be 2048x2048.