by Major Banter on Fri Jul 12, 2013 8:05 pm
What I've been doing lately involves 3DSMax, which is free if you're a student or happen to be some sort of swashbuckling gentleman.
Take a truly massive skydome (build one yourself), drag and drop your texture on (no cubemap nonsense, just a straight sheet) and make your tweaks.
Then install WallWorm SkyWriter, read the documentation, get it installed and voila. It works a charm when you get round the occasionally finicky issues it has (i.e. HDR/LDR rendering should be 1.0 by default, but w/e).
Why skywriter? Because it does a far better job than Vue or Terragen or whatever else ever has done, and skips the bullshit with cubing it. You get a sky that looks like a damn sky rather than a weird box thing trying to be a sky.