Skybox Plugins for Paint.NET

Tumby

aa
May 12, 2013
1,084
1,192
I have created 2 plugins for Paint.NET that should greatly assist in the manual creation of skyboxes.
The idea is that instead of painting on the 6 faces of a cube, you instead paint on the surface of a sphere.

Download it on github! Simple go to the Releases section on the right side of the main page. For the installation instructions, go to the main page and scroll down.


There is of course the catch that skyboxes can't be projected onto a flat image without distortions. Let me explain.

Valve decided to project the image onto a cube first. This keeps distortions under control, but makes them appear everywhere. Having distortions everywhere in all directions makes it hard to paint a skybox that doesn't obvously look like a cube.

With my plugins you can now also project the image onto an equirectangular map of a sphere. (This is what 3D models of spheres use.) Equirectangular maps have very little distortion at the horizon line, but extreme distortions at the poles.
All this means is that the top face of your skybox will need to be made in cube mode regardless.
As an example, a simple vertical gradient can be easily made in equirectangular mode and then converted to a perfect skybox in a matter of seconds.

Note: If you want to play with HDR skyboxes, don't use these plugins. You will need to convert the images to some other file format (like EXR) and use more advanced software than Paint.NET.


Here are some images to visualize what these plugins do:

Here is an image of 6 cube faces. The letters are the names of the 6 skybox faces.
cube_layout.png

Result after using the plugin "
CubeToSphereEquirectangular.png
Cube -> Sphere (Equirectangular)":
cube_layout_converted_to_sphere.png



Here is a picture of earth using an equirectangular projection. Image credit goes to NASA.
nasa_earth_sphere_equirectangular.png

Result after using the plugin "
SphereEquirectangularToCube.png
Sphere (Equirectangular) -> Cube":
nasa_earth_cube.png


If you have questions or feature requests (including plugins for other projections), please tell me below. Make sure to read everything on the github page as well.
 

Tumby

aa
May 12, 2013
1,084
1,192
Version 2.0 Release
  • Fixed a bug that caused several seams when using the "Cube -> Sphere (Equirectangular)" effect.
  • Added support for compressed HDR files. (HDR color = RGB * A)
  • Rearranged plugin's UI so that the super-sampling settings are together.
  • Visually improved the "Help" dialog and added a link to the github page.
Get it here: https://github.com/Tumbolisu/cube-sphere-paint.net/releases