[Zacam]

And also, the skybox method will hold up even under an engine over haul, and I can't say with 100% certainty that the FRED flag will, much less what will happen with a cross-platform FRED project.

[carbine7]

Hehe, no, that isn't very high quality at all ( ) *wonders if the 158th will pick up on this. . . . .

[Desertfox287]

I really need to learn how to do that nice

[Nuke]

you could probibly automate ht's meathod with a skybox generator, which would cross-reference the textures and generate the borders automatically. actually i have a lua based tga parser somewhere which could probibly do this. so you feed it its 1020 textures and it would save a copy with the borders in-place. tga is a very easy format to code with, even in lua.

[Herra Tohtori]

you could probibly automate ht's meathod with a skybox generator, which would cross-reference the textures and generate the borders automatically. actually i have a lua based tga parser somewhere which could probibly do this. so you feed it its 1020 textures and it would save a copy with the borders in-place. tga is a very easy format to code with, even in lua.

Preferably 2040² textures. My observations suggest that 8192 pixels of horizontal resolution is sufficient to offer unscaled background at typical FS2 fields of view, so in many cases it is the optimal resolution.

Larger, 4090² textures can be used with one mip map to offer high quality backgrounds for narrower than default fields of view. Without a mip map they tend to cause shimmering with wide field of view.

An automated texture parser would be welcome as it would reduce the time of handling the textures significantly, but I would prefer if people knew how to manually do it before using automated methods.

[Colonol Dekker]

Try Google Chrome ?

 
 
On my Sony Ericsson W995? Not gonna happen
 
Don't worry. I can get this any time I want. At home.

[Nuke]

you could probibly automate ht's meathod with a skybox generator, which would cross-reference the textures and generate the borders automatically. actually i have a lua based tga parser somewhere which could probibly do this. so you feed it its 1020 textures and it would save a copy with the borders in-place. tga is a very easy format to code with, even in lua.

Preferably 2040² textures. My observations suggest that 8192 pixels of horizontal resolution is sufficient to offer unscaled background at typical FS2 fields of view, so in many cases it is the optimal resolution.

Larger, 4090² textures can be used with one mip map to offer high quality backgrounds for narrower than default fields of view. Without a mip map they tend to cause shimmering with wide field of view.

An automated texture parser would be welcome as it would reduce the time of handling the textures significantly, but I would prefer if people knew how to manually do it before using automated methods.

i was thinking something along the lines of a stand alone utility to automatically insert the borders from the other 4 adjacent maps you just give it 6 2040^2 textures(really the size doesnt matter, it can be easily coded to take any size), then enlarge the textures and insert the proper pixels from the other maps. if i did it it would probibly use the command line lua interpreter from lua.org, and the commands and scripts would run from a batch file, could probibly also include a command line tga to dxt converter utility so that the maps could be converted to dds and dumped right in the game maps dir and would work.

[Tarvis]

Isn't it possible to do this with the cube model itself without having to specially modify the skybox textures themselves?

Can you map the adjacent textures using the model itself?

I know it's hard to imagine - here's a diagram I came up with to help explain. Basically using the UV mapping, the adjacent textures are mapped to the plane outside of where it intersects the other ones.

So it would do what is accomplished in the texture editing, but with the model itself using UV editing. Each face of the model hear would end up looking like a modified skybox texture if it were alone. The planes intersect where each texture crosses over into the new one.

Would this have the same problem or not? The player wouldn't see outside of the box anyways.

EDIT: Whoops, looks like I left out a top face. Oh well, it still conveys the point.

[attachment deleted by admin]

[Herra Tohtori]

Isn't it possible to do this with the cube model itself without having to specially modify the skybox textures themselves?

Can you map the adjacent textures using the model itself?

I know it's hard to imagine - here's a diagram I came up with to help explain. Basically using the UV mapping, the adjacent textures are mapped to the plane outside of where it intersects the other ones.

So it would do what is accomplished in the texture editing, but with the model itself using UV editing. Each face of the model hear would end up looking like a modified skybox texture if it were alone. The planes intersect where each texture crosses over into the new one.

Would this have the same problem or not? The player wouldn't see outside of the box anyways.

EDIT: Whoops, looks like I left out a top face. Oh well, it still conveys the point.

That's what I tried first on model level. Having six planes with each having dimensions of 4.096 units, then moving them inward so that each plane was at distance 2.040 from the center.

It didn't work, the engine rendered each of the faces since transparency on skyboxes requires object hierarchy being set up correctly, and since the parts of the planes "out of the box" were part of the same level of hierarchy as the "visible" parts of the faces, it rendered the parts that were supposed to be hidden, and results were even more hideous than just having the seams.

I guess it would be possible to just use a black border, but I suspect that would result in similar seam issues as the original problem with cube shaped skyboxen.

I then presented my research results in IRC, asked for a way to cut away the parts of the planes that were outside the cube, and was informed that it could be done by adjusting the mapping. blowfish then provided me the model posted in the beginning of the thread. Essentially, this is one way of explaining how the model mapping works, except the parts of the maps that are outside the cube are simply not rendered.

Not only that but you would still have to modify the textures exactly the same way that is used in the model posted in the OP... unless I understood something completely wrong from your explanation.

[Nuke]

i kinda fixed corners in my older skyboxes by moving the uv space inward exactly 1 texel width. uv coords are (16 bit?) floating point with 0,0 being one corner of the texture and 1,1 being the other corner (of course they can be more or less than that which is how tiling is done). now finding the width and height of each texel depends on the image resolution. i think 1/texture_width, 1/texture_height will give you the height and width of a texel in uv coords. a 512^2 texture is going to have a texel width and height of about 0.0019531. so instead of having each corner of a square polygon be at:
0'0
0'1
1'0
1'1
you would have them set to:
0.0019531,  0.0019531
0.0019531,  0.9980469
0.9980469,  0.0019531
0.9980469,  0.9980469

take care to avoid rounding errors, 16 bit floating point only gives you about 6 or 7 digits of accuracy with some margin for error. mind you these numbers are for 512^2 skybox textures, which is abit low res for freespace. even 1024^s are kinda block. i also cant remember if it worked or not.

[Tarvis]

That's what I tried first on model level. Having six planes with each having dimensions of 4.096 units, then moving them inward so that each plane was at distance 2.040 from the center.

It didn't work, the engine rendered each of the faces since transparency on skyboxes requires object hierarchy being set up correctly, and since the parts of the planes "out of the box" were part of the same level of hierarchy as the "visible" parts of the faces, it rendered the parts that were supposed to be hidden, and results were even more hideous than just having the seams.

I guess it would be possible to just use a black border, but I suspect that would result in similar seam issues as the original problem with cube shaped skyboxen.

I then presented my research results in IRC, asked for a way to cut away the parts of the planes that were outside the cube, and was informed that it could be done by adjusting the mapping. blowfish then provided me the model posted in the beginning of the thread. Essentially, this is one way of explaining how the model mapping works, except the parts of the maps that are outside the cube are simply not rendered.

Not only that but you would still have to modify the textures exactly the same way that is used in the model posted in the OP... unless I understood something completely wrong from your explanation.

What I meant was, for the areas outside the view to use the textures directly from the adjacent face (thus each face would be mapped twice) instead of a modified texture that has it added to it.

[Scourge of Ages]

Hey Herra, I finally tried it out and I must say it's very nice and "atmospheric" if you will. 

I have a question, that's probably going to be very newbish though: Can anybody take the skybox you provided and map our own textures to it? Will that work, or will we need to rebuild the whole thing in each case?

[Herra Tohtori]

Hey Herra, I finally tried it out and I must say it's very nice and "atmospheric" if you will. 

I have a question, that's probably going to be very newbish though: Can anybody take the skybox you provided and map our own textures to it? Will that work, or will we need to rebuild the whole thing in each case?

The model should be useable for any kind of skyboxes, just change the textures. Changing the texture names in PCS2 is almost a trivial task. The model is out there for download for a reason. I should probably upload it to FSMods if it isn't there already...

[bigchunk1]

Tried to follow the tutorial and I got this image:


I must be doing something wrong. I took six 2048^2 textures, resized them to 2040^2 and increased the canvas size to 2048^2 to get that white boundary. If I understand the tutorial correctly, the seemless uv mapping is supposed to account for this somehow, or perhaps i'm just lost. Please help!

Disclaimer: I don't pretend to know anything about skyboxes or image formatting or any of that sort!!! 

[Herra Tohtori]

Tried to follow the tutorial and I got this image:


I must be doing something wrong. I took six 2048^2 textures, resized them to 2040^2 and increased the canvas size to 2048^2 to get that white boundary. If I understand the tutorial correctly, the seemless uv mapping is supposed to account for this somehow, or perhaps i'm just lost. Please help!

Disclaimer: I don't pretend to know anything about skyboxes or image formatting or any of that sort!!!

Underlined the problem here.

The trick to making this work is to surround each 2040^2 area with the adjacent texture edges. That way, the "gaps" between the textures are covered in the mapping, and the seams will disappear.



If you observe this sample image, you can see that there are four textures surrounding the center one, and the texture area is outlined with the darkened area. You can also see the white small squares in each corner, where the white background shines through.

If it's still unclear, ask further specifics in irc sometime.

[bigchunk1]

That took quite a bit of careful pixel perfect placement, but I got it to work perfectly. Thanks.

[FreeSpaceFreak]

As mentioned above, it takes quite a bit of pixel-perfect placement to make this work. And those who get to make a fair few of these, know how time-consuming the job can be. So I made a GIMP script that does it for you.

Installation
1. Unzip the script into C:\Documents and Settings\<username>\.gimp-<version>\scripts
2. In GIMP, click Filters > Script-Fu > Refresh scripts
3. The script will now show up as "Envmap to skybox" in the Filters > Map menu.

Required input

• Place your faces in the following way (it's the Blender envmap layout).
  
  
  
  
• Recommended input resolutions are 6120x4080 (for 2048^2 maps) or 12240x8160 (for 4096^2 maps)
• Merge all your layers into one (Ctrl-M)
• Make sure your picture size fits your layer (Image > Fit Canvas to Layers)
• Your image should be in RGB mode (Image > Mode > RGB)

What will happen
The script will ask you where and under what filename you want to save the faces. They're saved automatically as PNG, DON'T give the filename an extension!
The saved images will merge seamlessly when used with the skybox in OP.

MediaFire download: version 1.3, January 2016 (3kB)

[Cyborg17]

I know the first thing I'm doing when I get home. :-D

[Herra Tohtori]

This script works quite nicely.





 

[Angelus]

I DEMAND the downloadlink for this skybox!