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Thread: I neeeeed a sky...annnnd another question

  1. #1
    Member
    Registered: Oct 2000
    Location: Massachusetts

    I neeeeed a sky...annnnd another question

    Wondering if anyone has a sky similar to this that they wouldn't mind sending me. I've tried looking around but coming up empty. Basically, Night sky. Starry. Moon doesn't matter. Maybe mountains too, the tops of them. The map is probably going to have fog/clouds, though I'm not sure how yet.

    I'm trying to find the best way to make the terrain work for this too. It's a CTF map on a few mountains, and I'm wondering the best way to make the mountains themselves. I'm virtually retarded with all things modelling, so making a static mesh is pretty much out of the question. That's what dragged me here originally, I saw SubjectiveEffect's terrain troubles and decided to give that a go, but it seems damned hard to generate it to be the right layout. Is trial and error with it really the only thing I can do?

    Thanks.

  2. #2
    Previously Important
    Registered: Nov 1999
    Location: Caer Weasel, Uelekevu
    erm... a sky similar to which?

    As far as terrain generation goes, the best bet is to use a combination of terrain and static mesh, and I would personally generate the terrain in Bryce or TerraBrush since it's bloody hard to make half-decent mountains with the native UEd thing. You can also round out the look very well by a combination of mountainous terrain / static meshes in the level and a sky texture with mountains + static meshes / terrain in the skybox itself. Plus Fogrings in the level AND skybox. And distance fog in the level.

    Add some careful painting and smoothing and texturing, and things should look fine.

    There's a lot goes into making a decent environment, and people can easily tell if all you've done is slapped textures on a skybox, unfortunately. You see why too many UT maps are underground hallway-room affairs, yeah? Or FLOATING IN SPACE LOL. Even Face3 wasn't floating in space.

    Quick ideas on best implementation of fog / clouds:
    Clouds painted on skybox texture + at least two slow-pan / alpha masked cloud planes in the skybox with some nicely expressive lighting + distance fog in the level + a very subtle fogring in the skybox.

    Fog is way to easy to overdo, so be careful setting the parameters. You really either have to go very thin or very thick in most situations, and always try to play it off the general colours in the level or things will look super gay when partially-occluded or suddenly popping up in the fog.

    Fogrings tend to have noticeable edges if you aren't careful, not at the texture seam, but at the tops... even though they fade nicely, there's going to be discrepancy between the top of the ring and the closest cloud plane, so that needs to be addressed with just a bit of careful lighting. Usually I find I have to play with the ScaleGlow on the fogring to get it to blend well, because if you just start making all kinds of things Unlit you end up with horror that you can't even light.

  3. #3
    Member
    Registered: Oct 2000
    Location: Massachusetts
    Quote Originally Posted by Gingerbread Man
    erm... a sky similar to which?
    If I had one that I knew it was similar to, I could get my roommate to edit it. I don't know any skies offhand like that. Do you know any sites or maps even remotely like what I'm looking for?

    ZylonBane used to link to a site in his tutorial of converting Unreal Engine Skyboxes to Dark Engine Skies, and that site had a ton of skies, but I tried that and it's down.

    Quote Originally Posted by Gingerbread Man
    As far as terrain generation goes, the best bet is to use a combination of terrain and static mesh, and I would personally generate the terrain in Bryce or TerraBrush since it's bloody hard to make half-decent mountains with the native UEd thing. You can also round out the look very well by a combination of mountainous terrain / static meshes in the level and a sky texture with mountains + static meshes / terrain in the skybox itself. Plus Fogrings in the level AND skybox. And distance fog in the level.
    Hrm. I think I used something like TerraBrush, or TerraGen or something when I was playing around with Return to Castle Wolfenstein a couple of years ago. I'll check it out, thanks.

    Quote Originally Posted by Gingerbread Man
    There's a lot goes into making a decent environment, and people can easily tell if all you've done is slapped textures on a skybox, unfortunately. You see why too many UT maps are underground hallway-room affairs, yeah? Or FLOATING IN SPACE LOL. Even Face3 wasn't floating in space.
    Yar, I'm definitely trying to make sure I do this right, but I'm fairly new to UnrealEd so there's a lot eluding me at the moment.

    [EDIT] Actually, for the terrain, how good/bad would it be if I were to do the whole "edit the greyscale bmp and have unrealed generate it"?

    Or is that what you meant?
    Last edited by JediKorenchkin; 23rd Sep 2004 at 16:51.

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