I want to make a good looking skybox. I have no clue what a skybox even consists of. All I know is it looks better than a single boring sky texture.

I have made two textures, a horizon texture and a full sky texture. The horizon texture tiles on one side with the full sky texture. I don't know if I need two textures or not. It would be great if someone could tell me what I need to do to get my sky looking better.

sky box usually has 5 textures that when lined up are seemless (4 side and a top). I make mine starting with a small box that fits a 256x256 texture on each side with no scaling of textures.. I then apply my sky box textures and then scale it up to the size I need.

on that note, do you then flag them as sky? Cause I always had trouble with that.

(how do you make them look all skyboxy-sexy?)

no, you don't need to flag them.... the box itself should be huge enough to not require JK's sky flags. Jedi I, why not reverse-engineer a level with a skybox in it all ready? If you want, you can pick apart my Mobius Grith level... The link is in my signature.

also, there's plenty of free skybox textures HERE if you want them.

I see.. I might actually reverse-engineer that level myself if you don't mind.

Thanks guys. I think I can figure this out now. I have to go to work now so I can't work on the skybox but thanks for the help!

If you are just starting out, I'd stick with the sky box. However, keep in mind that there's also the sky dome technique which is becoming more popular is some of the more recent games.

Personally, I pefer a sky dome over a sky box, but that's just my personal preference. My reasoning for this is that with a sky dome, there's always one sky surface that pretty closely faces you (depending on how complex you make it). With a sky box there's times when the angle of one of the sky surfaces is angled as much as 45 degrees from you. This can cause some issues depending on what lighting technique you're using.

mmm... so a sky dome would be a sphere? Or.. I guess the bottom surface wouldn't matter that much, so you could do like a half-sphere...

That's something to try.

sky spheres have to be done in milkshape or something similar.

And they're harder to do when hi res.

if(getThingFlags(source) & 0x8){
  do her}
elseif(getThingFlags(source) & 0x4){
  do other babe}
else{
  do a dude}

Why in Sam's Hills would they have to be done in Milkshape??

You don't need an over complicated dome (aka half sphere). 8 sides are plenty and you can follow the tutorial here on massassi for making a dome. All you have to do is scale by -1 to make it inside out and you can even delete the bottom surface (since it would never be seen anyhow).

Then you have two options:

Option 1

This technique will render a Battlefield 1942 skydome effect.

You can use Terragen to make a skydome texture. Search the editing forum for my name you'll run across where I've described in detail how to do this. You basically play with the sky and sun parameters until you find something you like, uncheck the terrain rendering option and then move the camera way far underneath and then point it straight up. Render the preview in a res of 256x256 (or higher if you want to fool with splitting to make it higher resolution), paste it from your clip board into your favorite paint program and then export it as a .bmp and convert it to a mat (Mat 16 with the dither feature on would work nicely).

The thing here is that the clouds don't move.

Option 2

This technique will render a SWG (Star Wars Galaxies) skydome effect.

You can do the same thing above with just removing clouds. Or, you can use custom textures. Basically you just want to make a texture (or textures) that will blend the horizon color with the primary color of your sky (typically being gray to blue during mid-day or red-orange to purple during evening...assuming you're not doing an Alien type planet where the sky is typically green or whatever).

Then what you want to do is cleave a surface perpendicular to the ground about 1/3 of the way up. This is your "cloud" layer. You'll need to create a tileable cloud texture, make it transparent, and then use a conveyor cog to make it scroll.

-----------------------------

There's some advance things you can do above and beyond that, but I'll let that soak in for now.

When working with skyboxes in JED, I tend to use the SkyFlagger plugin to quicken the process (this involves running the plugin and select the texture your using as sky and the plugin will flag it automatically). I always use boxes as I they allow the player see more and try grasp how big something is. If you in at some of the orignial levels, some of them use skyboxes to help attribute the height of something. The best example is the Palace Escape level (Level 8) and its a big skybox as it goes on for eternity when you use Fly Mode.

I think I like this sky dome Idea. I might look into terragen. It isn't even hard to make a dome in Jed anyways. Have you ever heard of the gorotate plugin. If you want accuracy, that plugin will do it. We'll see what I can come up with. If I get anything cool I'll post it. Thanks for your help guys.

I want Sith2 to come out. JK editing is evolving. Most of the new editing techniques people are coming out with just use loopholes to get around the current game engine's limitations. Sith 2 should make it easier to make cool levels.

Oh yeah, you since you still need a box to surround the whole level, I trongly recommend texturing the box a hunter green color if you have any plantlife and then unflag the dome as architecture (but still use the _walkstruct template). This will allow the leaves and such to clip through the dome and render what's behind it...which'll be green.

Mobius grith? Don't bother trying to cut the skybox out of that thing, you'll just hurt yourself. Theres a tutorial here or the hub that comes with a sort of 'sky box template'.

And don't forget to duplicate your edge pixels and adjust your scaling so that you don't get lines.

I am making some skybox textures that seem pretty cool to me. I wanted to put them on the skydome I made with the gorotate plugin. It doesn't quite work with a plain graded blue sky because the color change isn't smooth and it doesn't work too well. I was going for the Starwars Galaxy look but it doesn't look too good with the plain sky texture. How do you get a texure to look good on the dome. I was thinking you could use only a single texture that is actually circular and just stitch it from the center of the dome.

I downloaded terragen and was quite impressed by it. My computer took forever to render the image however. I also couldn't figure out how it could help me make a dome texture.

What do textures for skydomes generally look like? I don't want a plain textured sky dome with scrolling clouds because I wasn't impressed by the results I have had with this, even though I was able to stitch that type of texture and have it look seamless. Thanks for all the help guys. It is really fun to learn new things to improve my level editing skills.

You could use ForceRemap to texture the dome. Manual stitching won't work well. Gradients should be best for sky textures, especially if you have a seperate cloud layer. Just make a 256x256 circular gradient image (dark blue to light blue, or whatever) for starts.

I don't have any tutorials for force remap. The site was down when I went to look for them. I've always wanted to learn force remap since jed is horrible when it comes to texturing detailed models. This skybox is for the Great Wall of China ctf level I'm making. It was terrible texturing my 600 surface wall model in Jed. Does anybody have the force remap tutorials they could send me? I want to make player models for this (a gold team mongolian warrior and a red team chinese warrior). With force remap It would be 1000 times easier to texture than it would with Jed.

How would you get a sky dome texture with mountains on the horizon? That's really what I want. I use adobe photshop for textures.

This is a bit more difficult and can probably only be done with terragen and a "fish eye" rendering mode. If you DO need mountains, why not make a simple sky box? Or you can use a dome for the sky and add in seperate surfaces in front of it to slap the mountains on.

if you make a skybox big enough you wont run into any problems view it from other angles as long as it lines up good

I'll mess with teragen a bit more. I may be able to wrap a flat texture around a circle using a warp filter in photoshop. I'll try that. I really like my mountains though. They must stay! Thans again for the advice guys.

You have to center the camer at the center of the terrain, then angle it up 90 degrees. THEN, you have to set it's height to like -3000ft or something (can't remember, it's been a while). Don't forget to use Mat16's dither option.

You can then use ForceRemap. All you have to do is slap the textures on the model, open it up with ForceRemap, select the model name, then the texture name, and then click the 'Top' button for it to auto align the texture for you.

However, doing it the way you were doing it was find. The only thing I'd suggest is telling Mat16 to create one (1) mip level for you. That'll help smooth everything out for you.

Thanks for telling me how to make the texture with terragen. I looked and looked but couldn't find the thread where you described how do make the skydome texture. I'm looking for a plugin for photoshop that will warp an image into an arc or a circle. This should allow me to make the texture with photoshop but I think terragen is awesome so I'll try and use it too.

I almost forgot. What's dithering? Where can I find the dithering controls in Mat16? Thanks again! :p

In the latest Mat16 v1.1 (released 12-4-04), when you press the Batch Convert button, a window will pop up with two sets of options 'Transparency' or 'Error Diffusion' and then a 'generate mip maps' option. The options for 'Error Diffusion' will be 'none' or '16-bit dither.' You want to '16-bit dither' (it's set to 'none' by default).

There's my problem. I'm working on 0.9. Thanks.

If you're fussy, you might want to re-convert some of your textures then, mats made using 0.9 will only be 15-bit textures, 32k colours. Mat16 1.0 gives proper 16-bit textures with 64k colours.