Publishing a skybox¶

Tutorial:Virtual Worlds Made Easy Publishing A Skybox
Time to complete: 5 minutes approximately
Summary: In this tutorial we show you how to publish you're own skybox.
Aim: Learn how to Publish your own content to use in Vastpark.
Required application: VastPark Publisher¶

If you haven't read the Publisher documentation yet it may pay to have a quick read through to get a basic outline of the Publisher interface.

What you need:

• The VastPark Publisher
• Six Images for each side of your Skybox

This tutorial isn't about creating the images for a Skybox so if you don't have any images you can download a skybox to follow along here.

For those aren't sure a skybox is a method to easily create a background to make you're environments look bigger than they really are. Environments are enclosed in a cube; the sky, distant mountains, distant buildings, and other unreachable objects are displayed on the cube's faces. A Cube has six faces so hence we need six images to place on each face of our skybox.

Go ahead and open up the Publisher tool, click the "New" button and select the directory where your six images are. By holding down the CTRL key you can select each image in the directory and click the "Open" button. The Publisher will detect that you are trying to Publish a Skybox. By default the item tab is the first tab opened by default and will automatically use the file's name as the item's name. If you don't want to use the same name as the file it can easily be typed over. Give it some content tags and a description and then your ready to move on to the Asset tab.

Clicking on the Asset tab will bring up a number of fields which can be field out to describe the author of the content. Author name, email, URI and license details can all be added to the items MetaData.

The last tab you need to select is the Skybox tab where you will see a unwraped green cube and the first of your six images in the top right. If you hover over any of the green squares it will display its position name on screen for you. It's important to know where each of your images should be placed otherwise your skybox will look crazy when you view it in the Creator. The Publisher doesn't display the name of the selected image at the moment so I view the images in their directory and compare them to the one seen in the Publisher. When you have figure out where your image should be locate simply click on the green square, do this for each image and then you are ready to hit the "Publish" button.

You're skybox will now be ready for you to use in the Creator. If you have any problems be sure to leave a post in our forums.