Skybox Experiments

[Legacy_Izk The Mad]

               Hello, everybody! Well, I've finally gone and done it: Skybox Experiments. After an extended absence from the community, I decided I had to come back and finish what I started.

I always wanted to share my stuff with those of you who expressed so much help, support and interest over the last few years. I had hoped to make everything "perfect" before I released anything, but priorities change, and the state of this community has changed, though I still I see a lot of the same familiar die-hards still around, thankfully. I missed you guys. I have gotten into more advanced stuff since most of you last heard from me, which I could use some help with, but I'll save that for another thread. Let's just say I have a slew of new creature oddities in the works, and the word "animations" comes to mind.

With that out of the way, I decided to start a skybox thread here partly because I've had several requests in the past to write a tutorial on them. Well, I'm no expert, and I'm too disorganized to write a decent tutorial, and I still have a few questions about them myself. I figure between myself and the rest of us, this could become a helpful thread for skybox builders. Any tips, suggestions, or questions are welcome. I've been working on a list of tips of my own, based on my own experiences, which I'll add here soon.


I'll start things off with a question of my own: Has anyone else ever noticed any skybox blurring during the dawn transition?

I almost made myself nuts over that. I thought I had some misaligned images with one of my skies, but after redoing all the textures and checking the models, it still blurred. I found a model in the xp2.bif, called "skyfade", which references a texture called "skyblurpoly", which just sounds like it has to have something to do with the transitions, but I have no idea what it's for, or how it would be implemented in-game. The texture seems to be just a white square. It's rather annoying when you have objects in a sky that suddenly start to blur for a couple in-game hours until the switch to the day sky is complete. And it doesn't happen at dusk. Strange.  Any ideas?

Well, it's good to be back. Hope to hear from some of you here. -Izk
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_Dark_Ansem]

               I want to try it, but yet again I have to re-install NWN. damn stuff.
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_Jez_fr]

               oopsie, missed this post ^^

Does this "blur" happen only with one of your Skybox, or is it also happening on vanilla one?
I'm not quite sure what you mean by blurry (well I know what it means, but I don't see exactly whats the issue). Maybe some screenshots to show exactly the issue?

Oh and good idea about the Skybox thread. There' a lot to be done in that area, like your recent skybox submission shows =)
               
               

               

                     Modifié par Jez_fr, 29 août 2010 - 01:00 .
                     
                  

            

[Legacy_Izk The Mad]

               @Dark_Ansem, glad to have you on board. If there's anything I can do to help here, just ask.

@Jez, thanks for the reply. After all the threads in the old forums that helped me learn so much, I thought this thread would be a good way to repay the favor.

As for the blurring, I haven't fully tested it on other skies. The Bioware ones don't have any objects or landscapes that would display the effect I'm getting, and I've yet to try it with any of the CSP skies, to be honest. I did take some screenshots today to show what's happening, using the Grotto Cave sky I made.

BTW, I used the exact same texture to make each phase, except for the CTP mountains I inserted, and the same model, renamed, for each, so there shouldn't be any alignment issues.

This was taken at 5am, it looks just a little blurry, but that's due to the texture size. More on that in a bit:




This was taken after 6am, during the dawn transition, and you can really see the difference:




I had to make the textures for the skies with transitions smaller, because I had some issues with them, like this shot of my City Walls sky, before I resized it:



That caused a lot of hair-pulling, too, until I finally tried resizing it.

If I can find a way to fix this, I'll have to upload an update, as I felt a little guilty releasing them this way, but one hour out of the gameday wasn't enough to worry about, really, IMO.
               
               

               

                     Modifié par Izk The Mad, 29 août 2010 - 04:03 .
                     
                  

            

[Legacy_Jez_fr]

               I can't tell about the blur :/

About resizing, I had to also for my modern city skybox. I don't really know why Bioware's skybox are so huge. It forces to have either insanely huge texture, or that ugly blur. I think I reduced mine to 33 or 25% size, and its still bigger than needed for even the largest areas.
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_Izk The Mad]

               It is a little hard to see in those pics I guess, but the most obvious spot is at the top where the edge of the cave meets the sky. It's fairly crisp in the 5am shot, but fuzzy as heck in the next pic.

As for texture size, I made most of my skies 2048x2048, which seems to be crisp enough for the detail I wanted. It didn't work for the cyclical skies, meaning the ones with transitions. I ended up with that bizarre effect I experienced in the bottom pic. The sky actually turned black&white, and rearranged the image somehow. That stone wall should run all the way around just above the buildings, but instead I got huge walls on two sides and mountains on the others. Strange.
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_Dark_Ansem]

               what about making a skybox with actual real photos? too much for the engine to handle?
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_Estelindis]

               The trouble with actual real photos is that you won't get clouds of exactly the same size and shape at dawn, dusk, night, and day.  So the transitions don't always look the best.  Of course, one can photo-manipulate the other three lighting states from one, but I find it never looks as good as an original.  (Of course, maybe I'm just not good enough with skies.)



Great pictures, anyway, Izk.  :-)
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_Izk The Mad]

               I actually used photos for the space skies I made, but they were easy to seam together and don't have transitions. I agree with Este about the clouds, but the transitions are rather brief, 1 game hour I think, and unless you're playing with the camera all the way down, you probably won't even notice. If you wanted to add a landscape from a photo, you could try my trick and use an existing skybox texture with transitions as a backdrop and add the landscape photo over it. You'd just have to erase the real sky from the photo and modify the landscape to match each phase, dark for night, warm colored overlays for dawn and dusk.
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_Dark_Ansem]

               any new "magical" sky, like the Rose?
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_Morikahn]

               skyboxes blur due to mipmap issues. since you are far far away from the skybox, the graphic card gives a low mipmap version of the image, no matter how big your texture. To stop this from happening, you need to make a txi file for your texture and turn mipmapping off.
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_Invisig0th]

               M - That is the most useful bit of information I've read all month. Thanks!
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_Izk The Mad]

               

Morikahn wrote...

skyboxes blur due to mipmap issues. since you are far far away from the skybox, the graphic card gives a low mipmap version of the image, no matter how big your texture. To stop this from happening, you need to make a txi file for your texture and turn mipmapping off.

@Morikahn, hello! Thanks for the tip. Just "mipmap 0"? I'm willing to give something like that a try, but I'm still curious as to why it only happens during the dawn transition. That bottom pic I posted above is another mystery. The game engine apparently didn't like my oversized textures being used for a cyclical sky, and did weird things with them. BTW, were you ever able to make any more of those amazing skies you were working on?

This makes me want to ask if anyone knows of a good reference on .txi functions. I've played with "blending additive" thanks to a past suggestion by Morikahn, but I've often wondered what other functions/effects were possible using .txi's. It's one of the few things I never see mentioned in any of the stuff I've read around the community.
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_Ivanovich]

               Just a quick question on skies if I may (for anyone who might know the answer).  Some of the custom sky boxes in the CEP seem to not fit areas that are maximum in size.  For example, if you make an area that is 32X32 in the toolset, and then select a custom skybox (in this case, EC_GreenCanopy) and apply it to the area, it does not encompass the entire area.  If you walk around in game in that area, you will run into the "end" of the sky box and walk through it.  Once you walk through it, the sky box vanishes (of course).



Does this happen because the size of the texture?  How would one go about expanding this?



Thanks in advance.
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_OldTimeRadio]

               

Ivanovich wrote...

Just a quick question on skies if I may (for anyone who might know the answer).  Some of the custom sky boxes in the CEP seem to not fit areas that are maximum in size.  For example, if you make an area that is 32X32 in the toolset, and then select a custom skybox (in this case, EC_GreenCanopy) and apply it to the area, it does not encompass the entire area.  If you walk around in game in that area, you will run into the "end" of the sky box and walk through it.  Once you walk through it, the sky box vanishes (of course).

Does this happen because the size of the texture?  How would one go about expanding this?.

No, that would be caused by the skybox "dome" model itself being physically too small.  You could probably fix this yourself by copying the ASCII model for a skybox that is big enough and changing it's name and texture references to those of the smaller one.  I think it would be that easy.
               
               

               

                     Modifié par OldTimeRadio, 16 février 2011 - 05:00 .