Making Beautiful Skies

[Dim]

Merry Holiday Season to the community!
From DIM


This weekend I spent writing this tutorial on making beautiful sky effects, using skydomes. It's a varient on Socials nice tutorial on sky boxes (http://blendenzo.com/tutSkyBox.html). Please note that this tutorial is fairly long (about 25 pages in MS word), and is very comprehensive, and I walk the reader though most things very thouroughly, at least I hope. I geared it towards the newer folks, but I think that even advanced users will find it invaluable. Please read it, follow it, and give me some feedback. It is now hosted on Blendenzo's site (http://www.blendenzo.com/).

http://www.blendenzo.com/tutSkyDome.html

[MagicMyshu]

Yes!!

Yahoooooooooooooooooooooooooo

[Dim]

Heh, glad you like it. Give me some feedback on it if you try it.

[Stu_Flowers]

VERY well done. I esspecially liked the spacing at the top of your skydome!
--I use a different method which is far inferior, but simpler. I make a tileable cloud image, create a seam around my skysphere, and UV map the texture onto the halves. Then I mirror one of the halves. Not the best looking, but easy to do, and requires only one image.
however, you lose cool things like haze and such...again, WELL DONE!!
--if anyone is interested I can explain in more detail!
--Merry Christmas, and may we not forget the TRUE meaning of it!!~~Stu_Flowers

[Social]

Great work, It's good to know the method, however I doubt that most people here will go through all the trouble.

I mean going through terragen...I don't know. It's just so much easier to choose a good skybox set.

Also, as I always keep saying: "beware the polycount" I know it doesn't seem like much now, but every polygon will make a difference in the long run (especially if you are making something more complex).

I think the skybox still holds quite a few advantages when compared to the skydome, but as I said, it's good to know the method, and you did a great job on the writing.

Cudos to you Dim, great work.

[The_Warder]

nice I will definitely try it

[Dim]

@Stu: That was the method I used for awhile, which, due to my dissatisfaction, prompted me to find another way.

@Social: thank you for your kind compliment. Honestly, it really doesn't take that long to make a really nice and stitch it together, takes me about an hour. Also, you can just use one of the textures from any of the myriad skybox sites. I think I mentioned that. But the reason I present this method is to educate people so that they can make the textures specifically for their project so that it fits perfectly. I'm a long-time believer in doing all texture and model work yourself. And about the poly count; you really need to decide what your priorities are when it comes to making your scene. If it's a nice outdoor scene, hack a few polys of other things. I've had quite a bit of experience making low poly models, and I've learned that there's almost always a way to reduce the amount of geometry you have. Besides, it adds only 45 additional faces to your scene, with the mentioned subdivisions.

I'd just also like to note that the method I use for making that sky texture may also be applied to a 2D sidscroller or whatever you want.

Edit: If anyone follows the tutorial, I would love it if they'd post their results for us to check out.

[Dim]

Last chance to comment before I hand it off to Blendenzo for hosting... Anything? I'd really love to make this as helpful as possible to everyone.

[p00f]

Nice work Dim!!

I have been over, and over skyboxes and domes from halflife 1, quake 2,3, and the unreal series.

I must say that this is the best, and most descriptive tutorial I have seen to date!
Nice work!!

(I ment to post this a few days ago)

Have a good one!
PS... Texturemaker has a neat little terain generator thingie.... called the first day engine...
Much cheaper than terragen , and you get a bunch of seamless texture making goodness!

[Dim]

Thanks p00f! That means quite a bit. Also, did you check out Terragen's website? It's available for free. You can also geta a demo version of Terragen 2, which looks absolutely incredible. The only real limitation with Terragen, is that you can't use it commercially, and some of the anti-aliasing settings are disabled. In Terragen 2, they moslty just limit the rendersize to 800x600 or something, which has no effect on what you'd be using it for on this.

But did you have improvement suggestions? Or did it pretty much seem comprehensive enough?

EDIT: here's the site for Terragen (also givien in the tutorial)
http://www.planetside.co.uk/terragen/

And here's the Terragen 2 site
http://www.planetside.co.uk/terragen/tg2/index.shtml

I recommend you check out the gallery, it's fairly incredible. It's too bad it isn't open source

[blengine]

Nicely done. I've actually never made a skydome or box before. I'll probably give it a run this week, thanks. Plugged in the sticky.

[assumptions]

humm...
for sum reason When I click the link there is an error. Its says the link is broken. or there was a typo.

[blengine]

That link is for Social's tutorial on sky boxes. That one's broken, but this tutorial is the next link down, form savefile.com

[Social]

Originally Posted by blengine That link is for Social's tutorial on sky boxes. That one's broken

Here:

http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?t=71448

It's also on blendenzo.com.

[Dim]

Link fixed.

Thanks for putting it in the sticky Blengine.

@Assumptions/All: Soon there will be a browser version of the tutorial, so there'll be no need to download anything, but I want some feed back before I upload it.

[Dim]

Ok, the browser based version is here, check the first post! My endless thanks to Blendenzo for hosting it and formatting it wonderfully. Seems as though it took quite a while to upload, so thatnk you very much!

[p00f]

Cool!

Thanks again Dim, this is going to help out a lot of people.

I love Bendenzo.com... it has some of the best, up to date tutorials.

a great deal of what I know about the BGE I learned from there.

Have a good one

[Dim]

I consider it the best place for tutorial on Blender GE on the web. They're really the essentials.

[Virtus]

nice work!