Mountains in the background

[subabrain]

Hello friends,

i have a little question again :P

i just want to ask how i can do an effect to make "mountains" in the skybox, so its like there are mountains in the background ...

thanks for answers!

greetings

Robert

[Steve_Yorkshire]

1: make a skybox which features mountains

2: use a bigger terrain mesh and make mountains on the edges

3: make a small model of mountains with a hole in the middle and no collisions then scale it really big in the editor so it surrounds your terrain and looks like mountains in the distance (how CoD did it).

[Duion]

You can also make a big terrain in torque, screenshot it in all directions, then make a skybox out of it in an image editing program, I did this once, but was a complicated method with lots of work.

[subabrain]

Hi,

okay - ill try - thanks a lot!

Best Regards!

Robert

[subabrain]

Hi there,

i found something really cool:

http://www.custommapmakers.org/skyboxes.php

there you can download custom skyboxes ready for cubemapping ;)

here a little screenshot:

http://die-grafiken.de/example.png

its working very well :)

Greetz

Robert

[Steve_Yorkshire]

Reminds me of Terregen - which incidentally is another way of making custom skyboxes with mountains.

[Duion]

Skyboxes are not really needed anymore, they were mostly relevant in old times where computers were slow, now you can make a real big mesh terrain as background without that much cost.

[Dwarf King]

Skyboxes are not really needed anymore, they were mostly relevant in old times where computers were slow, now you can make a real big mesh terrain as background without that much cost.

 

But still skyboxes are more easy to set up than some huge terrains. It is also much faster. Also it makes your game more play-able on computers with lower specs. I for one prefer Skyboxes over big terrain. In that way I can control the sucking memory demon from draining all the energy from a small laptop. You see that is awesome. Skyboxes are therefore great tools to create a believable illusion of something great in the horizon with.

Skyboxes has also been used in games such as Dragon Age: Origin. For the trained eye such things are easy to spot ;)

[Duion]

If you use premade skyboxes yes they are easy to "make", but if you want to make your own it is quite a complicated process to create them, popping in another terrain is much easier.

[Dwarf King]

If you use premade skyboxes yes they are easy to "make", but if you want to make your own it is quite a complicated process to create them, popping in another terrain is much easier.

 

Well yes I use pre-made and customized skyboxes. Makes using skyboxes into a dream in the Torque 3D engine :D

[BLD]

Custom skyboxes out of Terragen are wonderful and can match HD photography when done right. They can function as a distant terrain AND skybox all in one.

[elfprince13]

Custom skyboxes out of Terragen are wonderful and can match HD photography when done right. They can function as a distant terrain AND skybox all in one.

 

Ditto on this, though at least last time I looked there was no push-button solution to get skyboxes out, and it required a little fiddling.

[Duion]

I could not find a solution for ready to use skyboxes for Torque as well, even premade ones I downloaded often needed a lot of fiddling to find out in which slot to put each skybox texture and additionally sometimes you need to mirror some skybox textures or all of them, since other programs seem to use other formats for them.

I think it has to do with openGL vs DirectX standards.

[BLD]

Custom skyboxes out of Terragen are wonderful and can match HD photography when done right. They can function as a distant terrain AND skybox all in one.

 

Ditto on this, though at least last time I looked there was no push-button solution to get skyboxes out, and it required a little fiddling.

 

More like a LOT of fiddling. Terragen is quite complex in it's presentation with a steep learning curve if you go it alone as I did.

No need for stitching software with the six camera scheme I learned to use. They look fantastic in Torque even at 1024X1024.

[Duion]

Well it can even be impossible if you do not know that eventually some or all of the images have to be mirrored in image editing software first.

I recently ported over skyboxes where I had to mirror all images by the x and y axis, to make them work and even after that I had to fiddle a lot to find out in which slots to put them.

In one skybox I made myself with manual stitching in Gimp, I had to mirror only the bottom texture to make it fit.

The easiest way to make skyboxes is to make a panorama, stitch it and then fill the top and bottom with blank color, this saves a lot of work in stichting and fiddling.