What is a cubemap?

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Hello, I've been working with shaders in the Godot Engine for a little while now. I've noticed the words "Cubemap", "radiance Cubemap" etc. more often. What is that? I couldn't find anything about it online.

Pixophir

Here you go:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cube_mapping

and specifically

https://learnopengl.com/PBR/IBL/Diffuse-irradiance

and in terms of the data in the engine it is a type of texture.

cybereality

Cubemap is basically a skybox. It's a 6 side cube to emulate a sky (or as a reflection map). Most people have switched to equirectangular images, though, because they are easier to deal with. Commonly called HDRI maps.

In Godot, this is done with a panorama sky and an HDRI image, like from this website. https://polyhaven.com/hdris

In Godot you would create a WorldEnvironment, then set the sky to Panorama Sky and import one of those images. It handles the sky, radiance, and reflection automatically.