skybox new skybox clouds material

[Arcturus]

Continuing from the parallax mapping thread. This one is more dramatic with heavy bumpmapping. Original textures/darkmod/nature/skybox/starry1/clouds has one black and white image texture, mine has two three. You can get dramatically different effects just by changing values in the material file. You can kinda tell that the parallax effect is static. It looks good without parallax too, but I like how it warps the textures, making it look more like a fluid and gives it a more 3d look. I also added slight specularity.

[Arcturus]

I replaced textures/darkmod/nature/skybox/starry1/clouds on the repository, so you can test it.

[datiswous]

Somehow I find the texture of the clouds not looking like clouds. It looks more like the surface of the moon.

It seems also that there's a background image in it that doesn't animate.

Edited October 23, 2024 by datiswous

[Arcturus]

I animated bumpmap at a different rate to get more variety out of one material and also to simulate how clouds change form as they travel. I'm still working on it.

[Arcturus]

I uploaded new skybox prefab to the repository. I had to use couple new .ase meshes to get it to work. I added another patch / layer of clouds, the original starry prefab used only one, plus some clouds specifically for the moon. The moon is a round mesh, plus another one for the glow behind it. It's hard to manage the highlights in Darkmod. Using blending with negative values helped.

 

[datiswous]

This looks a lot better. Pretty amazing actually.

Two things I notice:

• The clouds look a bit too (tiny) detailed on certain spots (maybe add some blur?).
• I think the black clouds that move over the moon should be a bit (more) transparant (especially around the edge).

Off course this is like giving feedback to a wizzard, becouse I've no idea how it's made.

[Arcturus]

I changed one of the new noise textures that I use for bumpmapping to be more uniform. Also changed the shape of the mask object in front of the moon and tweaked some of the values.

[grodenglaive]

Nailed it on the that last one. That is super cool.

[Goldwell]

Damn this looks absolutely incredible!

 

Have you tested this with the stormy clouds yet? would be curious to see if it has the same effect on the stormclouds skybox.

[Arcturus]

@Goldwell It should be easy to modify the material to make clouds cover the whole sky, move faster, etc.