After having played relentlessly with a sky sphere, I have taken another aproach to building my sky. ..A cube map. Basically, the same thing as a sky box. You build your environment in a 3d application (Bryce in my circumstance), take rendered shots for up, down, left, right, front, and back. The camera fov has to be set correctly and such, but it looks beautiful. I have a few questions reguarding the implementation however.

What would be the fastest (fps) way to handle the cube map?

1. A texture mapped wmb?

2. A mapped inside-out model? -- the texture woudl ebe fairly big however

3...this is an interesting idea.. I thought about setting up all the pics up in code as sprites.

Any ideas suggestion, forseeable problems.

I do have some problems with using a wmb, when you create a hollow cube, it is diffucult to get the 512x512 texture mapped to the cube because of the minute overlapping in the cube, I thought about building each side box separatly, but am worried about leaking.

Anyway for a good refrence article, go here:
http://www.gamasutra.com/features/visual_arts/19981023/skybox_01.htm

They look spectacular, I simply am trying to find the "best" way to do it.

TIA guys,
Cam

---edit---

another idea... a single sprite in the foreground, that is dynamically set to the appropriate view based in the orientation of the ship...I could do this in a dll.

I believe there may be some DirectX routines explicitly for cube maps, but I need to do more research.

as a side note during some experimenting, has anyone noticed any unusual (as opposed to other 3d engines) warping within a cube. The engine seems to warp the sides of the cube "away" from you instead in toward you as aligned. The problem is horrific if you choose to use a "standard" fov (camera.arc) of 90..which other engines default to.

Any ideas?

-----edit-------

...nevermind, I was able to compensate for the texture warping by subdividing my cube one more time.

That's an interesting link. Thank you.

As to building skies efficiently, I wonder if this will work:

1. Render one of Bryce's marvelous skies as a 360 degree panorama, then save it as a bmp. Multiples of 16 for the sides will of couse be needed.

2. In WED, add a 16 sided cylinder, then scale it up as if it was a sky box.

3. Hollow the cylinder, then texture with the panorama.

Don't know if taking the top and/or bottom off the cylinder will yeild better results.

I haven't tried this yet, but I'll bet it works nicely.
Let us know if you discover anything particularly intersting about this method and I shall do the same. It has got to texture better than a hollow box. But then maybe not .

Thanks for the feedback, I havn't thought about that idea. The only probelem is that the panorama texture has to be resized, and the final texture looks kind of ugly.

I did get the cube mapping working properly. It looks amazing. I am having some small problems lining up the textures. The main model texture also has to be 2048x2048 in order to hold all the 512x512 textures in 1 skin. Give it a shot. The biggest problems I ran into were skinning the cube.. I wound up using ultimate unwrap with a box UV to create the map.

Here is how to try it out...

create an action in your script

action SynchCamera{
while(1){
vec_set(my.x, camera.x);
wait(1);
}
}

add the model to your level. scale it to cover your main player. Assign the SynchCamera action to it. set ambient to 100 and albeido to 0, and nofog.

You can get the cube here (copy and paste in browser -- geocities):

http://www.geocities.com/xagon7/cube101White.zip

Set your camera.arc = 90; Most fps engines use 90 as the default anyway.

If anyone wants to write an application that will create an interiorly mapped cube with 6 given textures, please do so....I will write it if no one else wants to. It just seems most of you teenagers -- Noah, Symmetrix are quite talented, and most of all... have the time for it.

Anyway, if anyone can come up with a good procedure for skinning correctly, quick, and accuratley, I would love to hear it.

Hi CA,

I also tried using a hollowed cylinder for a sky with dreadful results. Technically it will work, but as you say, the texture just looks terrible. It can be done beautifully though in other programs. Maybe 3dgs will support this sort of thing in future versions since having the ability to do complex mappings independant of shape is a very useful feature. At present I am satisfied with 3dgs's features until I get the basics of game programming down pat.

Concerning mappings like you refered to, check out the application UV Mapper Pro. It's like 3dgs's skinner on super steroids, and version 0.25 is free.
http://www.uvmapper.com/

If 3dgs on day supports the .obj format, it will find it's sales taking off like a rocket. .Obj provides first class texturing.

If I turn up a better sky proceedure using current 3dgs tools, I shall post it here. So far though it has been no go.

At fifty four years of age I am finally getting to a point in life where I have a little spare time to waste on the interesting things that are fun to do, though if it's fun it can't be too much of a waste.

Thank you for the link orgo. I have d-loaded the demo but have not played with it yet. I own Ultimate Unwrap 3d, which I love, but maybe this will help more.

Thanks!