Skybox or rendering inside a large sphere?

Questions
1

A need I have is to render a 360 background field, like a star field in space, with a custom shader. Basically an environment with a custom shader. Should I use a skybox or use the inside of a large transparent sphere enclosing the whole world? Or is there other approach? For using a skybox, how do I run custom shader(s) on the 6 faces of the skybox? For using a large sphere, does the rendering looke the same on inside as the outside?

The other option I’ve thought of is to use a large quad to cover the screen and pass the camera’s angle in to the shader for it to account for the rendering direction.

2

Hey @will

Welcome to the Babylon family! Great to have you hear!

Here’s a couple of resources that might come in handy as you start down the skybox path:

If you’re going to create a custom shader and want to apply parts of that shader to different sides of the skybox, this technique should help:

Here’s a playground pulled from that doc that shows the technique in action:
https://www.babylonjs-playground.com/#ICLXQ8#1

I hope this is helpful!

Cheers!

3

Those are excellent resources. I’ve gone through the Environment and Skeybox before, but not the Apply Material to Individual Faces. That one is promising. Upon reading it I just realized the Skybox is nothing but a box with material.backFaceCulling = false to allow the rendering to show through to the back faces.

Thanks!

1 Like