As you progress into the more advanced 3D graphics techniques, you might find that you want to start applying special effects to your surrounding scenery. Even though the technique demonstrated in the earlier Skyboxes within the Reach profile recipe of this chapter certainly does what it is designed to do, it doesn't provide much help when writing shaders and effects to be applied over it.
What we need is a way to move from the simple, pre-textured polygon towards something where we have more direct control over the process via a shader. Luckily enough that's
exactly what we'll be doing in this recipe.
This recipe requires a skybox texture as shown in the following:
The exact position of the panels for each direction within the image isn't important, although you will need to adjust the coordinates specified in step 3 of the recipe to match your particular skybox texture.