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ATI has a nice little tool called CubeMapGen That takes all the hard work out of making a cube map. You can download it here:
http://www.ati.com/developer/cubemapgen/index.html
Once you start up the program, here are the steps to creating a cube map:
1. In the blue section on the right, hit the "Skybox" checkbox so you can see your cube map faces in the background as they're loaded.
2. In the green section on the right, set "Select Cube Face" to +Y (the up direction). Then hit the "Load CubeMap Face" button. From your set of 6 images, select the image that's in the up direction.
3. Set "Select Cube Face" to -Y (the down direction). Hit the "Load CubeMap Face" button. Select the image that's in the down direction.
4. Set "Select Cube Face" to +Z (the forward direction). Hit the "Load CubeMap Face" button. Select the image that's in the forward direction.
5. Set "Select Cube Face" to -Z (the back direction). Hit the "Load CubeMap Face" button. Select the image that's in the back direction.
6. Set "Select Cube Face" to +X (the right direction). Hit the "Load CubeMap Face" button. Select the image that's in the right direction.
7. Set "Select Cube Face" to -X (the left direction). Hit the "Load CubeMap Face" button. Select the image that's in the left direction.
8. Now that all six of your panels are loaded, switch the "Display CubeMap" drop-down to "Output". The sphere in the center will turn black because you haven't generated any output yet.
9. Hit the "Filter Cubemap" button toward the bottom. CubemapGen will work for a few seconds and then your sphere will display the filtered version of your cubemap.
10. To save out your cube map, Hit "Save CubeMap (.dds)" toward the top and give your cube map a name.
That's it, your done. Now you can load the resulting DDS file into an FX shader as a cube map.
Before this tool came out, I made cube maps in Photoshop by pasting all of the panels into a single image where they were all in a row. Then I used the Nvidia DDS plugin to save the image in cube map format, but that was a lot more laborious because you have to paste and align all of the panels by hand. Another advantage to this new tool is that it correctly creates the mip maps so that they don't have seams around the edges at lower levels. Just be sure that you check the "Save Mipchain" box before you output your DDS file.