Springheel's First Skybox

[Springheel]

Ok, I've been playing around and have learned to make basic skyboxes. Here's one (I didn't do the graphics).

 

 

Next step is to create a night-time one with a city-scape on the horizon, for use in the city maps. We'll need one for our main menu graphic.

[BlackThief]

looks pretty awesome spring I just checked out some of the original skies - they're more than 2000 pixels wide -> we can make some really asskicking high-res skies

[Fingernail]

Since skybox textures don't have to go through the intense lighting procedure passes that all the other textures do with every light, they can afford to be teh big!

[Kappow]

Wow, that's sweet!

[Domarius]

Terragen I must have seen so many games that use terragen generated images for their skyboxes And it's no wonder, the program rocks (and will have rocks in the next version, btw).

 

Yes, the skybox screenshot is very promising. This project is always going uphill.

[Renzatic]

Damn good job man. When I come off my self enforced break tomorrow (wanted to step back for a second to get a fresh view on things...and World of Warcraft kinda came up) I'm gonna try to figure out how to do multilayered clouds somewhat similar to the original Unreal.

 

Skies are one of the least regarded, but one of the most important, aspects of creating a cool atmosphere.

[jay pettitt]

Skies are one of the least regarded, but one of the most important, aspects of creating a cool atmosphere.

[Renzatic]

 

It's true I says!

[Springheel]

Hmm, Terragen is a little more limited than I thought. Trying to get a city-scape skybox is going to require some serious playing, at least on my end.

[Domarius]

Oh yeah - it's only good for moutains, water, and sky at the moment.

 

Other rendering programs can render sky-boxes. And there must be plug-ins for ones that don't do it straight out of the box. So many professional games have sky boxes. The software for it must be readily available.

[Springheel]

Do you know of one for Photoshop? Actually, if I could just get my hands on one that had a cityscape of any kind, I could then modify it to look like ours. But I can't seem to find one anywhere. I know there is one in D3 itself, but I can't find the file.

[Renzatic]

It could be possible to draw one by hand. All you'd have to do is make a panoramic cityscape/mountain/whatever and divide it up into 5 equal parts.

 

I would prefer that over using Terragen. While it's a good program, I don't think the end results would fit with our style.

[Springheel]

It's the top and bottom of the box that give me the most grief...I'm not entirely sure how to make sure they mesh properly at the edges. Hmm, though I might be able to just use someone else's sky as a base. I'll try making a primitive one this weekend and see how it goes.

[Renzatic]

The bottom I wouldn't really worry that. Unless we're going with a few UT style maps where you have a single structure surrounded by open skybox, it's doubtful that anyone will ever see the bottom half of it without cheating. I was thinking it'd be better used for the background and far horizon with geometry placed in front of it.

[Springheel]

I realized that as I started working on it. I'll have something finished for tomorrow, but I don't know what it will look like once it's put together.

[Domarius]

Do you know of one for Photoshop? Actually, if I could just get my hands on one that had a cityscape of any kind, I could then modify it to look like ours. But I can't seem to find one anywhere. I know there is one in D3 itself, but I can't find the file.

No, all these things have to be rendered in 3D first, cause you need the 6 views (that make up the sides of the "box"), and they need to be skewed properly.

 

Why don't you just use any old rendering program and place six axis aligned cameras, and render a shot from each one? I haven't done it before, but that is all Terragen is doing.

[Springheel]

Well, I tried creating one manually, but somehow ran into problems getting everything to be the correct size. I somehow have also lost the webpage tutorial about how to import them into the editor, so that has knocked me off schedule, somewhat.

[Springheel]

Well, I managed to get it into the editor, but as you can see there are a few problems...

 

[New Horizon]

Hey, it still looks pretty damned Good Springheel. Good job. It will come together I'm sure.

[sparhawk]

Well, I managed to get it into the editor, but as you can see there are a few problems...

Looks good. I don't see any problems. Only challenges.

[Fingernail]

A bit low-res, perhaps?

[Springheel]

A bit low-res, perhaps?

 

Yeah, it's only 768x768. I think I would need to make it much larger. But I just want to get the basics about how to do one before I go all out.

[Fingernail]

yes.

[oDDity]

Yes, that's te way to go. I liked those old hand paint panoramas from THief. All you need then is to soure some images of the night sky. Morrowind had some fantastic nighht skys, I have it installed ATM, I wonder if I could get the night sky images out somehow..

Failing that there are loads of astronomy sites around.

[Fingernail]

768x768 would be a good model texture resolution, methinks. Not as memory intensive as 1024, but allows more detail than 512 alone.