What is a Skybox?

A Skybox is an image that describes the look of your projects background environment. It’s basically a sphere that surrounds your project and which is textured with an image. As you know, textures are rectangles – if you want to map them onto a sphere, you have to unwrap the Skybox like it’s done with a world map. This format is called Longitude/Latitude, one term for one axis.

There is another way to save the Skybox into a file, unlike Longitude/Latitude. It is called the cross format and looks like an unfolded cube. Both image formats are supported and can be loaded into Enscape.

Usually, in a normal image like a JPG, the sun has the same white-value than a bright piece of paper. For lighting purpose, this is not enough. A high dynamic range panorama therefore contains more information than your monitor can display to incorporate the extreme differences regarding the brightness. Using Enscape’s virtual camera exposure, you can explore the different lighting scales in your image.