Rotate about a skybox

Question

I'm a beginner with OpenGl so please discount my ignorance. I've managed to create a skybox (with a texture mapped cube) and would like to rotate the view (eye) around the center of the box, so I can admire the view :). By changing the X/Y coordinates of eye/camera in GLM.LookAt() I'm able to see most of the faces of the skybox but I'm not able to see the top and bottom faces though I'm sure that they are rendered. In any case what's the best way to rotate around the skybox? What I want to do is exactly shown in this video

Thanks!

EDIT: Sorry for the lack of relevant information.

1. I'm using OpenGL version 3.3.
2. Not using immediate mode. Everything is via shaders and VBO/VAO
3. I have already setup the projection, view and model matrices which I pass to the vertex shader, and obviously have the texture loading also working as I can render the skybox. At the moment i've set the projection and model matrices to Identity for simplicity.
4. I'm deriving the view matrix from GLM.LookAt(), So initially i thought that to rotate around the view box, I'd just have to change the viewMatrix
5. I'm working on C# using SharpGL
6. To draw the skybox, I've set up a VAO to draw a cube with vertices in the range (-1,-1,-1) and (1,1,1). Then I load 6 textures for each cube face to 6 Texture Units. During the rendering I draw the cube and update the texture for each face using a sampler variable. All of this seems to be working OK. I verified this my scaling down the size of the cube and checking if all 6 faces were being rendered properly by rotating the ModelMatrix

I suspect one problem is that I'm not positioning the camera in the center of the cube. At the moment it seems to be viewing the cube from outside. I'm still trying to grasp the usage of GLM.LookAt().

This is how I'm rendering the skybox at the moment. And I can see the front face of the cube, but how do I go about placing the camera in the center of the box and rotating it?

 viewMatrix = mat4.identity();
 projectionMatrix = mat4.identity();
 modelMatrix = mat4.identity();
 viewMatrix = glm.lookAt(new vec3(0f, 0f, 1f), new vec3(0f, 0f, 0f), new vec3(0.0f, 1.0f, 0.0f));

        shaderProgram.Bind(GL);
        shaderProgram.SetUniformMatrix4(GL, "projectionMatrix", projectionMatrix.to_array());
        shaderProgram.SetUniformMatrix4(GL, "viewMatrix", viewMatrix.to_array());
        shaderProgram.SetUniformMatrix4(GL, "modelMatrix", modelMatrix.to_array());

skyBox.renderSkybox(GL);

EDIT #2 I managed to figure out my error. I was trying to look at the Top and Bottom faces by doing viewMatrix = glm.lookAt(new vec3(0f,-1f, 0f), new vec3(0f, 0f, 0f), new vec3(0.0f,1f, 0f)); and viewMatrix = glm.lookAt(new vec3(0f, 1f, 0f), new vec3(0f, 0f, 0f), new vec3(0.0f,1f, 0f)); which was giving me a blank screen. The reason being that (0,1,0) is collinear with my up-vector and LookAt() couldn't generate the viewMatrix in this case. Changing the UpVector makes it OK!

Answer 1

There are different ways to implement / render a skybox but one way is to render the skybox first, turning off depth writes and using only the rotation from the camera, no translation. Then, you render the rest of your scene as normal on top of that. This gives the appearance that the skybox is infinitely far away and that you can never reach it, but you can see it all around you as you look different directions.