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I can't see there being a difference. A skydome is just a textured 3D mesh, correct?

Gary wrote:I can't see there being a difference. A skydome is just a textured 3D mesh, correct?

That is what I would assume... but I got the impression from the previous posts there might have been some alternative (undocumented) "Sky Sphere".

Sky domes can have animated/scrolling textures unlike a normal skybox.

jangalomph wrote:Sky domes can have animated/scrolling textures unlike a normal skybox.

Skydomes would just be an extension of skyboxes, correct?

You would put skydome models in the skybox. Or did I misunderstand how they work?



And we can have animated textures, just not as the sky texture. You would just make a mesh or plane and apply a texture(a simplistic skydome I suppose) inside the skybox.

@Gary... from my understanding of everything (which does not actually often include "EVERYTHING")... I think you are right. I may have confused the issue here by interpretting "skydome" as some alternative to skybox in earlier posts.

they're not really an extension of skyboxes. They both have their pro's and con's.

Skyboxes can be viewed from any angle (as in, you can look down and see the sky if you want to) and are perfect when representing static things that are supposed to be super far away like stars, planets, and other things don't show any parallax when the player moves around the world. Also they can be easily implemented even in older hardware so they're super fast.

Skydomes lack a "down" but they're better suited for dynamic skies because they lack the projection issues that you have if you try to animate a texture around a skybox. If you try to translate a texture on a skybox, you can easily tell where the edges are because the pixels will suddenly appear to change direction when they reach the edge of a face. It's techincally possible to make a sky sphere that has a down direction, but you run into projection problems and you have to have a much higher resolution texture to sample from in order to have the same texel densities as you do with a skybox.

Another option is the "Sky Plane" but that's fallen out of style because it's incredibly ghetto. It made sense 15 years ago, but no longer.

stoopdapoop wrote:they're not really an extension of skyboxes. They both have their pro's and con's.

Makes me curious about examples for best practices to use the two in conjunction.

Have a skybox making the normal "high res sky" and use a sky dome in 3d skybox to enhance it with "dynamic" cloud/shaders.