can't create sky from an EquirectMap without a warning

Seen in Jayfella’s jme-vehicles project:

Oct 23, 2020 5:37:55 PM com.jme3.material.Material checkSetParam
WARNING: Material parameter being set: Texture with type Texture2D doesn't match definition types TextureCubeMap

This diagnostic is triggered by

SkyFactory.createSky(assetManager, "Textures/Sky/quarry_03_4k.jpg", SkyFactory.EnvMapType.EquirectMap);

in Main.java.

The resulting render looks great; I just want to eliminate the diagnostic message. I tried to work around the warning without modifying either jme3-core or the JPEG, but was unsuccessful.

Sky.j3md has

    MaterialParameters {
        TextureCubeMap Texture

But I can’t use “quarry_03_4k.jpg” as a TextureCubeMap because it’s 4096x2048 (not square).

This is one case where type-checking material parameters is awkward.

[riccardobl]

I think there is a problem in the design of the material here.

The matdef wants a TextureCubeMap that should always be mapped to a samplerCube, passing anything that is not a cubemap there would be wrong by definition, this works because the Sky shader uses a macro to define Texture as a sampler2D if EQUIRECT_MAP or SPHERE_MAP are set.

Imo this is bad practice, the matdef should have two params, one for the cubemap and one for the texture2D, or be divided in two different materials.

[stephengold]

I like the solution of 2 different material definitions for sky.