Skies

[Dietmar]

Hi,

I don´t know if I´m in the right forum, but I wonder how to make skies for 3d-games using photos. I mean, how to photograph the sky? Anyone can give me a hint?

Thanks in advance
Dietmar

[Michael]

Well, as for sky photos, you can buy Texture Cd's from our store, on some of them are very good scenics. On the net there should also be tons of the sky photos, but I don't think they will be in the desired resolution, but try you may... ;) As for making them - well, it's not very easy to make a good sky map, you have to think about all the sky, not the fragment that the character will look on. I use Photoshop, it's a great tool for working between layers.

I hope that helps. ;)

[Dietmar]

Thanx for the quick reply...

yeah, there are lot of skies out in the net, partial great looking, but I need 360 degree skies in order to seperate them in a right-, left-, front-, back-, up-, and down-part...

Any help would be appreciated!

[T-1000]

Ouch! 360 skies? Those are tough to find. Like the 3DT guy said, the texture CDs usually have some bonus stuff on them like skies- but I (like many others) have to buy food on a regular basis, and can't afford them yet. hehehe

Therefore, a good resource for you to look into is getting a free copy of Terragen for the PC. It's a free-to-use program (limited res) that does a fantastic job on skies and landscapes. Here's a shopping list for you:

Terragen 9.19: planetside.co.uk/terragen -- Free
Panoramic script: Search for it, EZ -- Free
HDR Shop: Search for it, EZ -- Free
Stitcher plug in: Search for it, EZ --Free
SoPack and export plugins: Search for it, EZ --Free

By search for it, I mean do a little digging on the Terragen site and Google and what not, and download everything you can find on the topic. Get outfitted- it's free. =)

From the program, you take a random scene. Basically generate an arbitrary landscape, give it some rudimentary texturing (IM me if you want a readymade texture), and get it primed for rendering. If you're short on time, just boot up the program, uncheck "render landscape" to capture the skyline down to just under the horizon.

Next, once you have it ready to roll, you turn on the HDR output plug in so that your images will have HDR info packed into them. Make sure to follow the directions on the bottle! ;)

Next you render the images via the panoramic plug in so that it will script the sequence of images together. This means that it will capture one left, one right, one up, one down, etc etc.

Then you use the stitcher plug in to take the 6 images and stitch them together into an unfolded square image. It’s going to be huge, so keep in mind that you'll need a pretty keen computer to handle it. Over a gig of speed, over 256 ram- well tweaked. Hehe

After that, just import it into HDR shop where you can change it from that unfolded panorama to a...shoot what's it called. Gah! I'm at school so I'm not following this along with ya. =) But I've done this before so it's a really simple process when you get some practice. Anyway...where was I...Right! You change it to a...Ah here we go- angular map! Well shoot, I found that out from one of the sites that originally told me how to do it. I followed the links out so you'll have at least a good starting point. =D I Feel all dumb because I've written all this full of generalities and ambiguities when there's a perfectly defined resource right out there. Dang!

Here you go buddy, enjoy!
http://www2.cs.uh.edu/~somalley/hdri.html

I'm going to go coddle my self esteem now.