A great little tutorial from Frederik Steinmetz who shows how you can tweak or even create your own CubeMap, that will be used as a 3D environmental texture in a 3D application such as 3ds Max or Maya, using After Effects and the handy Create3DBox Script.
in this tutorial Frederik Steinmetz demonstrates how powerful After Effects can be, even when you’re only editing still pictures
The Create3DBox script will create 3D shapes from After Effects layers and easily build a box, sphere cylinder or pyramid including platonic solids.
Using Create3DBox in After Effects, Frederik shows how to alter a cubemap from one standard format to another, and also show how you are able to create your own.
Check out the tutorial for Creating and Editing 3D Cubemaps Using Expressions to Dynamically Retouch Textures in After Effects here.