360 degree bitmap

I have a question that got sparked by queer face Selentic. Some of you know ive been making some renders of terrain recently and selentic asked me if it was possible to make a 360 render of terrain and use that bitmap for a sky box. Anybody know if this is possible?

It should be possible, you're just going to have to play around with it, but yeah, I don't see why it wouldn't work.

yeah, should work just fine. Although the biggest thing will be how you apply the material to your sky model.

What would be the best way to do this?

cant you set the camera angle to something like 180? Im sure theres a way to make the camera render it all at once, but if you cant find it then probably image stitching would be the best way. Render square pictures every 60 or 80 degrees around in a circle and then in photoshop of something just put them together into one image.

I was thinking about image stitching but The camera angle idea has caught my attention. I will look into it.

Yeah, easy. Lemme write up a tutorial.

Step 1: Skydome
First, make yourself a sky dome. Basically, get a sphere with a radius that encompasses your scene and scale the z axis down so it's squashed to hell and looks like a dome. Convert it to an editable poly and delete the bottom half faces so you have a dome with a large open face on the bottom. Flip all of the faces and apply a proper sky texture to it and now you have your sky dome.
EDIT: Add a skylight in and maybe an omni to approximate a sun.

Step 2: Put your geometry inside the sky dome. Try and make your middle ground match up with the bottom of the sky dome so you don't have big patches of black in your final textures. Alternatively you can set the background color to something similar to your skybox under render->environment.

Step 3: Cube
Put a cube in the place where you want to render your textures. You'll probably want to make it a smallish size and you'll probably have to play with the size to get it right.

Step 4: Material
For the material, pick a new material slot and set opacity/glossiness to 0. In the box next to Diffuse select "reflect/refract". Change the Source to "from file" and change the size to the intended resolution of each sky bitmap (preferably something that is a power of two like 256 or 512). Apply the material to the cube you made earlier and scroll down to "Render Cubic Map Files". Go ahead and click on "To File" and save the files in the spot you want to put them. To finish up, click on "Pick Object and Render Maps" and then pick the cube.

If you don't get good results with that you can try making the sky dome a full on sphere and seeing how that works or you can try moving the cube up higher. Tweak with the settings, etc. Now that you have your cubes put them through some panorama stitching software.

You should never have skybox items be one single mesh and material. Break it up, use miltiple meshes, and layer things a bit.

Yeah I have a few hi res meshes and I want to turn them into flat bitmaps because they most likely wont be really close up and you wont be able to tell the difference.

Im not sure if the point got across right or not, but Ill clarify what was being asked a bit. Pretty much taking a 360 degree render of high poly mountains, and then using the bitmap in a sky, so that when the level is played it gives the illusion of high poly mountains far away, but they are really just a bitmap.

I admin I have absolutely no clue what Im saying :|