The Harvest Moon Consortium

[Christopher]

I have not ventured into this area and I was looking for any input? I read some posts by Danmar at his Lands of Kray and wrote in inquire more into his Sky Box ventures. Let me share his reply.

Heh, I'm still not sure how to do it 'right'.

The main problem is the skyboxes aren't 'true' skyboxes. They're just texture mapped objects with inward facing polygons that surround a level. There's none of the typical camera tricks. But it stands to reason since they were never written into the engine in the first place

To see some of the limitations in them, create a typical sized area, say 8x8 or 16x16. Stand in the middle of it and with your view aimed at about 45 degrees up take a screen shot. Now compare that screenshot with the texture for the skybox. Typically you'll see roughly 1/3 or less of the texture is viewable.

Now go to any far corner. More of the texture is visible but still you can't see much of it.

The problem is increase in zones that have unfettered edges, i.e. not surrounded by tree tiles or cliff tiles. This allows you to see that the 'virtual' tiles extend about 4 tiles outwards. Under the original camera lock this wasn't an issue because you couldn't see it. Now you can and it looks kinda like poop

The original camera lock wasn't in place for any reason but to hide the missing bits and pieces of the game IMO.

Other issues that I know of:

Every CC skybox set that I downloaded and tested has one or two thin lines of artifacting that go up and down. I can't say I fault the builder because I couldn't get rid of it myself. A skybox that renders perfectly fine in studio max, built by someone who kinda knows what he's doing in regards to setting mapping and gizmo size, has this problem in NWN.

One key point here is all the CC skyboxes and my own attempts were involved with a tubulal skybox. There could very easily be a engine limitation in NWN in dealing with objects this large that causes this to occur. In fact I can't think of any other cause. For me the flaw always occured in the center of the east side which I think is direction 0 in game(for whatever reason that might be). In several of the CC skyboxes this flaw was in both east (0) and west (180). Depending on the texture's overall 'business' and brightness/contrast this can be more or less visible.

The skyboxes I looked at in particular were one each of Nano's and Stilgar's sky sets.

At this point I broke down and looked at one of BW's skyboxes. They're actually literally using a box, not a tube or hemisphere. This does NOT display the thin vertical artifact and in addition their skybox is smaller than both of the other sets by a considerable degree. At this point I was bored to tears trying to figure out what the actual cause
was so I didn't do any further testing to see if it was the squareness or the size that fixed the vertical flaw.

The problem with square box though is that when you pan and lookat the sky you can see where the corners are.

Another oddity, the BW skyboxes include a top cover to their box that's mapped with a completely different texture. It seems to be impossible to get to a point to see these although I would guess that if you built a 32x32 area and layered cliffs along the entire way you might even get to the point where you're above the sky box. In addition even when I moved this horizontal cap down to well inside camera view, it never
rendered.

That's another limitation in this particular method of skyboxing. Raising the height of the camera yields very bad things happening.

This is quite possibly, even probably the reason the skyboxes are so large which results in such a large waste of texture space and loss of detail. To deal with the maximum possible height change of the camera.

So to sum up:

To have the (IMO) best looking skybox at this time knowing what I know and realizing what I didn't bother to check, you need to do the following:

Create the skybox for a reasonable maximum sized area. I chose 20x20. Size and adjust the position of the skybox so that it works for at most 3 or 4 cliff heights. Make sure you test by going to one corner of the area and looking at the opposite corner.

I would also recommend you built your skybox out of 4 planes of about 5x5 or 6x6 sections. Make very sure you're texture mapping will fall dead even on the right points. Then join them together, put them all in one smoothing group and then test looking for artifacting.

If no artifacting is seen and the general size and placement works for you, then go back and began rounding the skybox out a bit, bulge the middle sections of the planes and bring the corners in a bit.

Test for artifacting at each major step.
-Danmar

Any thoughts on this? Or it might help someone else. I have not gotten a change to play with his idea's yet.

[Christopher]

Ok, I am working on skyboxes for the CTP project. Bioware contains 21 different skies (4 sets the cycle between Dawn, Day, Dusk and Night). One of the skies (icy) is the same no matter what the cycle. These textures are not small. They weigh in at 3-4 mb (I have not looked at a DDS version yet). Here is my fist shots of one I made;




These were taken in the CTP Black Desert set. Question I have is what kind of skies should I make? If they cycle I need to have them in a theme. Now I could go with some very Alien looking skies as well. Really big suns, 2x suns or moons (no, I am not making a Krynn skyline... ask DLA). So, I am open to theme suggestions.

[Bannor Bloodfist]

hmmm... two suns and two moons, that sounds interesting. Getting the changes between night/day would be interesting also. Maybe have early morning have one moon and one sun, full day have both suns, evening one sun and the other moon, then night with both moons?

If you go with themes, then maybe a two sun, single moon set with clear, and also cloudy skies.

A true 'storm' sky is also needed. Biowares Stormy skies are just a few clouds on a blue background, to be truly stormy, the sky should be darker with maybe greenish grey clouds or deep grey.


Don't worry about the size. if it takes 300 meg for the whole set then it takes 300 meg. The skyboxes are intended as an addition to the tilesets. I am not at all worried about how big the entire CTP gets at this point. There are people out there with 800meg single haks so I don't think we have to worry too terribly much. I do know that there is a total limit on sizes, at least according to Danmar and Velmar, but they didn't give me an explicit size limit. I think a lot of it depends on the amount of ram and cpu power you have.

So, if you go themes, we could split the sky boxes into seperate haks per theme, and the end users could choose to only utilize those that they need. We would just have to watch the .2da entries for that. Maybe offer several version of the control hak, with all the 2da entries, then one for each sub set. Shouldn't be that much more work.

[Christopher]

Just to be clear here. I am getting these shots via PhotoShop plugin Aurora 2.1. I make no artistic claims I just move the sliders to cool settings. Here are some idea's.

Spooky

Sun and moon shot, don't think I can do multiple suns.

Clouds maybe to fluffy...


Very cool!

[Christopher]

Oh, I forgot! Underwater?!?

[Bannor Bloodfist]

Check this link Chris for your DDS vs TGA question

http://www.nwnctp.com/forums/showthread ... post&t=508


Skip the underwater, I expect them to show up with the 1.67 and POTSC content.

As for the others, not too bad, but I would suggest greater / sharper detail for the moons at least. In other words, not soo blurry.

[Primogenitor]

A Sigil skybox would be cool, seeing the city arch above the area. See http://www.orionworks.com/shop/SVJShop/ ... wn_600.jpg or search for "ringworld" type images for some ideas.

Other than that, simply any variety would be good. 0-100% cloud cover in units of 10% for example, at all 4 time slots. Since its a semi-automatic system, it should be relatively simple to do series of shots.

One skybox for each element and/or plane perhaps. (ethereal, shadow, etc)
Floating Islands / town / castle / etc.
City skyline of some sort.
Starfield, possibly with varients wth a close planet/moon/etc

[raven280]

Hey Chris,
Just to throw in my two cents, but at this point, so much of my computer is dedicated to NWN1 files that I would say make the skybox file as large as you have to. Make it as good looking as it can get...I would gladly eat the extra file size for the skyboxes you have in your demo pics.....sky boxes are awsome eye candy for tilesets...even the old plain ones. I would love to see "interior" tilesets like the CEP (only better), such as different house ceilings, cave roofs, and dingy dungeons/crypts....

Raven280