Places to download or buy assets - in particular skies?

[stayinwonderland]

Hi, I'm wondering if there are sites out there that offer assets, either free or to buy that I can use in UDK?

I'm also looking for a place where I can pick up a selection of different skies (I'm new to UDK so don't know how skies work, but the default scene in the feb 2012 release there's a nice moving sky, would be nice to have a good selection).

Cheers

[JessieG]

The moving sky (or just clouds really) i believe is a panning material. You could also achieve this with particle effects. For the sky itself, it's just a dome with a texture.

For custom skies, make half a sphere and turn the normals inward. Scale it large and then vertically some and do a planar projection of it in the Y axis of your 3D modeling program.

For the texture, find a 360 degree panorama of a sky, bring it into photoshop, then scale it to a power of 2 (I usually go with a 1024x1024). Then in the filters, use a polar coordinates filter to make it appear round. When applied to the sphere you made it should wrap around like an actual sky.

[TheAgent]

You can also find sky panoramas in CGTextures.com if you don't have access to a good camera.