Sky box question

[eMPeck]

Apply Your texture to a sphere with max Self Illumination and render cubemap from center of it. There is a tool in 3dsMAX that can automate rendering of cubemap for You (in reflect/refract map if I can remember).

[Steen]

Thanks. That was very helpful. That's kind of a hidden feature, but it works well. It made a nice map for me. Now I've moved on to a Lithtech tool specific skybox problem.

This one's a long shot, but if anybody has some experience with dedit and making skyboxes I could use some more help. I understand how to create a skybox, and how to make it work, but I'm getting seams along my edges. It's not in the maps and it only shows up in the engine. Been messing with it for hours. Any suggestions . . . anybody?

Thanks again eMPeck.

Steen

[ArchangelTalon]

Sounds like it could be something to do with mip-maps? I'm not sure, I'd assume that an engine would turn them off for it's skyboxes by default, so I'm kinda doubting it is.

Is the skybox 6 separate textures or one unwrapped cube?

[NikLG]

I have no experience of the LithTech engine, but the problem you are having is probably a bi-linear filtering thing. We get it all the time on stuff that we do here ( on PS2 and PSP games ) with Renderware. The way I fix it is either set your UVs to .01 to .99 instead of 0 to 1, though this will stop the sky box textures from matching unless you compensate for it in the textures, or ( and this may not apply to the LithTech engine as I have no idea what info you can export from Max ) turn off any texture filtering in your material in Max. The second option might make your texture look a bit pixelated depending on it's resolution but it will get rid of the edges that you are getting.

Hope that helps..

Nik

[Hourences]

It never shows up in game you say? I wouldnt care too much then.
The normal way of fixing such problems is by turning of the tiling of the texture , set the mode to clamp instead of wrap. Lots of engines and programs like 3dsmax support that. Maya too I think.
If you dont have that option scale it down slightly like mentioned.
Another possible solution is to create a border around the texture, basically manual clamp mode. Drawback is that you waiste a little of texture space like that.

[Steen]

Thanks for the responses. I'm still struggling with this. I turned off mipmaps (ArchangelTalon, - it's 6 512 maps). I don't see any options for filtering. I tried setting my uv tiling to .99 in max. It does't seem quite as bad (may be my imagination), but it's still there. I know it's not the texture I created because I checked it out in photoshop. No seams and they line up perfectly. It seems to me to be uv's or geometry. Seams seems.
Anyway, here's what it looks like. If you have any more suggestions you can find me running around in traffic. Thanks.
Steen

http://imagehub.geekfury.com/files/9/skybox1.jpg

http://imagehub.geekfury.com/files/9/skybox2.jpg

[XepptizZ]

The infamous seems problems :P. In UT2k4 you can set clamps for textures like that. Anyways, it mgiht be caused by the texture, wanting to tile and rendering it (slightly smoothing) in such a way that it "smudges" into the other end. If anything, than you should scale the uv's up, so that a slight bit gets cut off the texture, just getting out of that tiling reach.

[Steen]

That worked. Scaled my images down 2% and manually adjusted my uv's in max until they looked ok. Ah the sometimes convoluted and crazy world of 3d graphics.

Thanks to everybody for posting. One day maybe I'll know something and can help you out too.

Steen

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