Creating a Simple Skybox

This tutorial will show you how to create a simple Skybox for Orxonox. You will mainly use Blender for creating the actual Skybox and a small shell script for integrating it into Orxonox. You will probably need to run Linux for that. First, please download ​skybox.blend, ​venusmap3.jpg, ​venusbump2.jpg and ​rename.sh that are attached to this page. Put them all in the same folder. This is important, since the paths to the textures are stored in the .blend file. Otherwise, you will probably not see any textures in the sample scene.

Open the sample scene skybox.blend with Blender. In this Blender scene, you can create your Skybox. Later, the Skybox will look as if you were sitting in the origin of the Blender scene. You can see the camera at the origin now already. Feel free to create planets, suns or whatever entities you would like. A basic star background will be rendered automatically. Make sure you don't touch the camera or its animation.
If your scene is finished, it will be only a few minutes until the skybox is integrated into the game. Press F10 to switch to the Scene menu. Choose an appropriate output folder on the Output tab. In the picture, I chose "box", which is also the default setting in the sample scene.
In the same menu, on the Anim tab, you can click ANIM now. This will render 6 frames and store them in the output directory you selected. In each frame, the camera will render in one of the six directions in 3d-space. These six frames will become the six sides of your Skybox cube. Save your work and quit Blender now.

Open a shell and cd to the directory, where you saved the 4 files at the beginning. There should be a folder containing the 6 frames you rendered before (0001.jpg-0006.jpg). Run the shell script with the first parameter being the desired name of your Skybox and the second being the name of the folder containing the frames.