Tip: Replacing the sky images in Virtual Building Explorer

Anonymous — Thu, 30 Jan 2025 14:28:53 GMT

How to get rid of the nuclear winter sky that comes with VBE:

1. Find a good 360 degree cube map of a sky online. A good source I found was cgtextures.com. There you can get a single image of a cube map which is six sides of the cube, but all in one long horizontal image.

2. Crop and save the individual sides of the cube map and replace the images that come with VBE. The file names tell VBE where each image goes so they all get stitched together correctly. Attached is a diagram of how I deciphered the faces of the VBE cube map.

The files are located in:
MAC: Applications:Graphisoft:Virtual Building Explorer 2:data&colon;Textures:Skybox

WIN: c:\Program Files\Graphisoft\virtual Building Explorer\Skybox

In windows they are .bmp files and on mac they are .tga files with names like XN.tga, YP.tga, etc.

It is important you save the original files before you alter them in case you screw up. You have been warned.

[NOTE: for some reason I had to flip each image of the cube map (flip vertical command) so they would stitch correctly. I'm not sure why because the original images that came with VBE are oriented with the sky up. Mine are sky down, but appear sky up in VBE...whatever.]

3. Save out your model from AC to VBE. Now it will use the new sky

4. If you find a few skies you will want to use, just make the cube map for VBE and save them somewhere on your computer and you can swap them out in VBE whenever you make a new VBE file.

Have fun

Re: Post your best VBE "renderings"

Anonymous — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 22:48:12 GMT

Before

Re: Post your best VBE "renderings"

Anonymous — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 22:55:09 GMT

After

Re: Post your best VBE "renderings"

Karl Ottenstein — Sat, 16 Jan 2010 23:30:44 GMT

Fantastic result, Eric - changes the whole atmosphere (pun intended) of the image - especially with the added info in the distance at the ground line. Looks rendered ... and must make the VBE experience much nicer.

Re: Post your best VBE "renderings"

Djordje — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 05:02:15 GMT

G-reat tip! Thanks Eric!

Re: Tip: Replacing the sky images in Virtual Building Explor

Karl Ottenstein — Fri, 11 Mar 2011 23:19:45 GMT

topic Re: Post your best VBE "renderings" in Visualization

Tip: Replacing the sky images in Virtual Building Explorer

Re: Post your best VBE "renderings"

Re: Post your best VBE "renderings"

Re: Post your best VBE "renderings"

Re: Post your best VBE "renderings"

Re: Tip: Replacing the sky images in Virtual Building Explor