2 sky cubes

Thanks man, they are looking good.

I get corrupted file for "sky_morning+6.tga" when trying to extract...
Is it just me?

Thank you immersionfx. You are right. There was a problem.

To all: Please reload the file because there was a problem with the second sky cube in the archive.

Frank

oops sorry, mybad

thank you so much frank :P i got the one i voted for!!!

thats the best skycube thakks!

Dankeschön, mal schauen ob ich sie irgendwie in mein Projekt "reinbasteln" kann.

wow looks awesome

Thanks for the great looking skycubes.

Beautiful, awesome work crying for more samples .

Thanks thats exacly what I need

Soon as I saw the format first thing that came to mind was "Sky tracer 2" from lightwave. Sure enough, it was. Lightwave makes some awsome skies in minimal time, glad to see other people use it.

What about the night sky cubes?

Whats wrong with Terregen made skycubes, if i may be so bold?

Nice sky Frank. Looks great.

I see, and are these skies animated in some way? Just I have been using terregen to generate skies for a while, and have some that I was going to contribute here, but if they are not useful there's no point! lol

So what should I be using?

Terragen sky cubes are nice as well. You can render cool mountains. I used that for a few of my images. But the clouds are very simple. They have some kind of a mosaic effect applied and look very flat.

The clouds from Lightwaves sky tracer have more volume, shadows and better lighting.

Some people are still waiting for night sky cubes. But as I mentioned earlier I am not really happy with it. When you use details like stars in a reasonable resolution like 512 and you play your game with 1024 or more then the stars are simply blurry. Tey have to be resized from the engine to the double of the origninal size and even more in a higher resolution. You can see that in almost every game that uses night sky cubes (even Doom3, Quake4 and so on).

But this problem is not an issue for day sky cubes. There are not so much small details like stars, galaxies or mountains.

But when you use a 6x1024x1024 sky cube then it will take up to 20 MB of memory in your graphic card. That is simply the reason why all those AAA games use such blurry and small sky cubes.

But nevertheless I will present some night sky cubes soon. But I have to work on many projects at the moment.

maybe you could make a night sky cube without stars.

ah... ok ello thanks.

I must have missread the above. Would be a shame I have been making some nice skycubes with terregen at 1024 rez which takes ages, and was worried I had wasted a lot of time

i own terragen , too. and it can create great looking skies. be sure u upgrade once tgd (terragen2) is out. cant wait:)

remember you have to be registered to use the terragen results in commercial products. but the price is fair

Yes. Ello is right. You can only use terragen images after registering. If I remember right then it is only 20 $.

But as I wrote above. I would use Terragen only for terrain rendering. The clouds are not that good. But you could exchange the sky with another one and layer the mountains over this sky

Frank

Edit: But if you rendered 1024 rez then you will already have the registered version

Yes I am a fan of PAYING for software, although my wallet doesn't like it!

I like the terrain generation, I think its nice and fast and with some basic tweaking you can create some fantastic imagery. The sky....yes hmmmm! I must agree with you Frank, I find the clouds look very 2D regardless of the mode, in fact 3D looks like layers of 2D, probably exactly what it is! lol. No matter what settings I use I seem to end up with a slightly poor cloud image, however a little touch up in photoshop can sort this right out, but it's labour intensive and ...well I can't draw! lol

So as a REGISTERED user of 3DStudio Max (just to ensure there's no confusion ) I am looking at creating cloud layers or even complete sky systems here. I am curious though, is it possible to combine sky cubes? I mean, so render a terrain_skybox with alpha for transparency, then underlay a sky background? Can you force movement in the skybox? so creating several layers of clouds and putting them on a gentle spin to create the illusion of moving clouds??? I appreciate this might be a little off topic, sry for the hijack!

EDIT: I appreciate you have a sky package for sale, and im not asking you to hand over all your juicy secrets, im just trying to get a handle on the limitations and possibly options available. Thanks

if i remember right, terragen costs 100$ , if you buy terragen2 when its out, you get 100$ off the prizem then.

i just saw, they have a endOfYear price at 79$ , go out and get it:)

for moving clouds, you could also look at my skySystem2

indiGlow: Yes. You could do something like that. In Gamestudio (and in Torque) you could use a sky cube for the background and a second layer for the moving clouds. I would suggest to use a sky sphere model with some transparency to create a simple rotation.

If that is a needed option for many developers then I could render some sky spheres with layers of clouds. But first I want to finish the night sky package.

OT: but time for another one of my wierd ideas (am on a break at work ). Can one of those 'grass around player' scripts be modified so that you can have 'stars around player?' Meaning some small textures with stars, with alpha (and maybe a mtl effect) so when player looks up there are some better defined stars close by him; along with the usual skycube with some dim stars this might provide a better looking night sky.

Yes. A script that creates stars can do much more. You could have some shiny flasing stars. You could also create some shooting / falling stars. That would make a fancy night sky.

There is a function in Gamestudio to draw on a texture. May be that could be a start.

So is that a my lips are sealed comment ello? lol no worries

Do you mean sky stars bupaje? Might have some problems with perspective there... I wonder if you could wrap a texture several times, maybe on a skydome? like a 1024x1024 tiles N times? Maybe its just a question of making a huge inward sphere and applying a star tile to each face, or group of faces. Use an Alpha-map tga and create a few layers of spheres, and use a skycube backdrop for very distant stars...

...if you follow that theory through, you could build a very detailed sky system in this way, changing the sphere textures over time, you could easily bring up the sun, fade in some clouds and you could also rotate them to create movement....

...maybe skySystem3 eh Ello?

already working on that, but with small steps(too less time)

Finally we managed to offer the first two sky cube packages at Dexsoft:

http://www.dexsoft-games.com/skycubes.html

Night and fantasy sky cubes will follow very soon.

Best regards,
Frank

TGA's are much bigger than JPG. So I converted them to JPG (highest quality) to keep dowload files smaller.

Are you still going to give us a free nice night skycube as you said?

No problem. We will offer much more free objects very soon. There will be some sky cubes but also alot of free models and textures.

Thanks. I really like your skycubes. They look very good!!!

thanx

Hey Frank, this is much appreciated. Thank you!

thanks frank,really nice.