..the sky texture also has some advantages.
Interesting. I have yet to find a method for getting anything usable from a sky texture. And i have really tried:
I did a test a long time ago, called the Snowmantest ( for some reason). I was trying to understand why my beautiful evening-sky looked like it had been painted by a two-year-old with a vanilla-strawberry soft-ice.
The snowmantest was really simple. I used this image to texture the sky.
I opened the file again to day, just to see if anything had changed i v5.2. Placing the camera facing east, I saw this in the preview-window:
And this when it was rendered at high quality:
Tilting the camera upwards, I saw this in the preview-window:
And this when it was rendered at high quality:
So there's not only the distortion, there's also the significant difference in how the sky appears in the preview-window, compared to the high quality rendering, to take into consideration when constructing an image that will display correctly on a rendered image.
My little experiment with terrain.party seemed to give quite an accurate result when imported in Vue.
But of course I can't import 8 sq. kilometers ( the smallest part you can get) into SH3D, so I have to use Photoshop to select a smaller area, a process in which the accuracy is lost due to the uncertainty regarding the exact size of the selection.
When it comes to the accuracy I was referring to earlier, it was not meant as a topographic accuracy for modelling perfect replicas of actual places. I was just referring to a relative accuracy in my own creations.
I have have during a long period of time, slowly been able to create a 32-step grey-scale palette that gives me a predictable outcome, but it's not based on any scientific tables or algorithms, just on my own tryings and failings.
C