Making a skybox in Unreal.

Following this tutorial:

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JPKFCv9VprM

Get/Create the skybox texture.

Most tutorials are just using a generative space picture maker thing. Layered noise and point lights. I have little interest in this, I want to use real space.

The James Webb Space Telescope takes pictures of real space. Big ol pictures too. Lets use that.

• https://webbtelescope.org/contents/media/images/2022/033/01G70BGTSYBHS69T7K3N3ASSEB
• Now just popping that in Unreal as the skybox is literally disgusting.

There’s two issues we need to correct here:

1. Dat some low res 💩
2. Super visible seams. When the texture is wrapped each end of the texture touches eachother. So you have to do some fancy to fix the seam

Fixing the Image

I use Krita as my open source photoshop equivalent. I opened it in there.

• Image → Resize Canvas; I YOLO doubled the size, I also made it a perfect square.
• New layer, black paint bucket, dump
• Next I grabbed a section of the background stars, started copypasta into the blackness.

With these fixes I the image looks like this: