MGAC 007 – Portal Sky Box

#1

Skyboxes seem to have a way of forcing you into faking things and testing your skills on how you manage your environments. I want to see what kind of things everyone can come up with, so no restrictions on the skybox. Your skybox could be in a setting above the clouds, deep in a huge cave, on a strange planet or even orbiting a strange planet.

Rules are made to be broken, but for those of you who want to be provided with some specs, here are some:

(2) 1024^2 32 bit images (split however you want)
(1000) three point polys
(1) Use you head, get creative, make it useable, and don’t go overboard. Just make it sick!

3D app renders are acceptable, but in game renders are better, and if I can’t tell I wont ask. When you submit, tell a little about how you built your skybox, your textures, some mesh if it applies, and a few renders. Keep your submission images under 800 px wide. If your skybox is animated, add some movie links.

Ends my time (MST) 9:00 Sunday January 29th

#2

I’ve got some stuff laying around, can it be a dynamic skybox?

#3

Dynamic, yes. You gotta use all new content though.

#4

smash hit.

#5

What is a sky box? Is it the same as a sky dome? Why would anyone need 1000 tri’s to make it? Ok there must be a simple explanation for my stupidity. I need mor guide lines, some examples would help.

Sorry for the simple minded questions.

#6

Yeah, its the same as a skydome. This is a portal skybox - So you can add buildings, structrues, space ships, temples, planets, giant trees and all kinds of things made of mesh to the skybox that will be projected on your actual level walls. You can make it a skydome if you want. I will put together a little bit of a visual for you in a bit.

#7

for 3DBB and anyone else who wants to know.

the term ‘Portal Skybox’ was something I picked up from a modding comunity… so it may not be a universal term for what I am talking about here. It seems that a Doom 3 portal skybox is the same thing as a standard Unreal skybox.

anyway, here is an example form the Unreal level Anubis:

You can see from this mesh, that there is a basic box (in brown) around a sky sphere with a cylinder (greenish blue), a flat plane that appears to be slicing through the center of the whole box (in purple), and what appears to be a concentration of mesh in the center (white).

Taking a closer look at the concentration of mesh in the center, you can see that there is a landscape with some pyramids. It is hard to make out in that picture, but if you look in the center of the pyramids you can see the UnrealEd actor icon for a SkyZoneInfo Actor. That is the point where the projection on the level occurs.


Just over the top of the pyramids is where that purple plane is located. The texture of that purple plane is a tiled cloud texture with the use of alphas so you can see parts of the sky beyond. The cloud texture on this level is moving to add to the realism.

Now when you go above the clouds, you can clearly see the moon and the sky sphere.


Now when the player enters the level, there are what appear to be some pyramids, a moon and some moving clouds in the sky off in the distance. None of that mesh is actually in the ‘room’ with the player, it is simply being projected on the walls and ceiling.

#8

Grr, I keep forgetting to reply to this. If the deadline had been about two weeks later, I’d probably have something fairly decent for you. Unfortunately, I’ve not had much time to work in Max for the past month; no 3D for me.

Anyways, maybe I’ll be able to whip something up today. Perhaps a Mario-themed skybox and stuff? That’d just require pixel art, and I think I could do it in a day if I stay really far below the limits. Maybe I’ll even do something in Nintendo DS-type specs.

#9

If it is cool the spces dont matter to me (just so long as they are some type of video game specs). DS or PSP specs would be quite a bit easier to manage, I may do the same.

#10

I have nowhere to put the videos, but I have a few renders along with the maps. I must admit that I did cheat somewhat; I don’t think the Nintendo DS can handle 256’s. But really, I just don’t care. :smiley:



Wires:

Renders:


An animated GIF.

And that’s it. I don’t think I can take it further unless I make it really large and start adding stuff from other Mario Brothers games. I also can’t really do an in-game render type of thing since I’m kind of clueless.

There are three layers, by the way. There’s the outer dome, and two inner cylinders. The innermost cylinder rotates slowly as in the animated GIF.

EDIT: 56 triangles, by the way.

#11

I am beta testing a new 3D engine called Poetry In Motion, and at the same time working on a space shooter game based on it. Here is my skysphere with a tiling 512 x 512 star texture with an additive 512 x 256 nebulae texture on top. The planet consists of colour, specular, reflection and bump map (transparency map for clouds), each at 4096 x 2048 but scaled by the engine as far as I can tell.

#12

petterms, I am having a little trouble figuring out how your skybox comes together. Can you post more info on that?

#13

I have been playing with various ways of creating a good skybox for stars, and obviously a regular box will create “pinching” in the corners unless one render out 6 sides, which again steal alot of texture memory. There is also the regular type of sphere (sides and segments), but I got some noticable pinching at the poles there too, so I tried using a tesselated sphere. Then I made a UV where the tris are as un-disorted as possible, so regardless of orientation in space all the stars look good. I also scaled the UV’s 200% to create the tiling.

To create that additive nebulae glow, I made a spherical unwrap of the model and used that for texture layer 2.

#14

Swizzel, your the big winner.

#15

just like to point out your bumpmap on the earth is inverted, the ocean is bumping out and the land is going in.

#16

Well, thank you! I’ll get right on the new thread.

That’s a pretty cool skybox and planet, petterms, though I’m having something of a hard time figuring it out. Could you show us how the planet goes inside the skybox?

#17

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