A cubic environment map is a texture that represents the scene surrounding a 3D object. Each face of the cube covers a 90 degree field of view horizontally and vertically.
The cubemap consists of a set of six attached texture surfaces arranged into a cube.
These faces are all created in a single call and are accessed in much the same way as any other set of attached surfaces.
Each face may contain the same or different textures and a cubemap may also be mipmapped.