Author Topic: Skyboxes  (Read 11252 times)

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Offline fightermedic

  • 29
  • quite a nice guy, no really, i am
rerendered with twice as many samples!
last p3d updated, i think it looks a bit better now - although the difference is probably not visible in this preview
>>Fully functional cockpits for Freespace<<
>>Ships created by me<<
Campaigns revised/voice-acted by me:
Lightning Marshal 1-4, The Regulus Campaign, Operation: Savior, Operation: Crucible, Titan Rebellion, Fall of Epsilon Pegasi 1.1Aftermath 2.1,
Pandora's Box 2.2, Deep Blood

Other Campaigns I have participated in:
The Antagonist, Warzone, Phantoms & Echo-Gate

All the stuff I release is free to use or change in any way for everybody who likes to do so; take whatever you need

 

Offline fightermedic

  • 29
  • quite a nice guy, no really, i am
i'm now really in the process of rendering all the various locations in the system
here's moaaaaaar
>>Fully functional cockpits for Freespace<<
>>Ships created by me<<
Campaigns revised/voice-acted by me:
Lightning Marshal 1-4, The Regulus Campaign, Operation: Savior, Operation: Crucible, Titan Rebellion, Fall of Epsilon Pegasi 1.1Aftermath 2.1,
Pandora's Box 2.2, Deep Blood

Other Campaigns I have participated in:
The Antagonist, Warzone, Phantoms & Echo-Gate

All the stuff I release is free to use or change in any way for everybody who likes to do so; take whatever you need

 

Offline Rodo

  • Custom tittle
  • 212
  • stargazer
    • Minecraft
    • Steam
wow! cool stuff around here. I lost this thread completely!
el hombre vicio...

 

Offline fightermedic

  • 29
  • quite a nice guy, no really, i am
thank's Rodo :)
and here's the next 2, slowly grinding away at them
>>Fully functional cockpits for Freespace<<
>>Ships created by me<<
Campaigns revised/voice-acted by me:
Lightning Marshal 1-4, The Regulus Campaign, Operation: Savior, Operation: Crucible, Titan Rebellion, Fall of Epsilon Pegasi 1.1Aftermath 2.1,
Pandora's Box 2.2, Deep Blood

Other Campaigns I have participated in:
The Antagonist, Warzone, Phantoms & Echo-Gate

All the stuff I release is free to use or change in any way for everybody who likes to do so; take whatever you need

 
Great work, keep it up! :)

 

Offline Herra Tohtori

  • The Academic
  • 211
  • Bad command or file name
This topic is relevant to my interests and you are doing good work. :yes:

thanks for all the praise, and especially to Axem for putting it in the newsletter :)
got myself a new 4GB memory module today, so my renders will be better in the future, yay!
(seriously, blender needs 8GB of RAM + 32GB of virtal memory for compositing 4k*8k images? WTF?? )

Sounds about right, big images take a lot of memory and when you run out of RAM the paging to HDD will slow down process quite a bit. This happens especially if your Blender scene uses layers and compositing in render settings, which pretty quickly causes cumulative memory use at high resolutions and high anti-aliasing settings... and especially if you use high-resolution textures for the render scene itself.

This is one of the reasons I would advocate (and why mods like Blue Planet) use cubical skyboxes instead of spherical textures.

I don't know what workflow you are using, but assuming you have your scene set up in Blender, you can always render it in cubic format as well as spherical. The amount of work to set up the skybox is a bit higher, and I'm not sure if the cube can be used in p3d to show them off quite so conveniently, but the benefits are significant.

The best thing is that you don't need to deal with monumental individual files. Six files sized 2048² will offer about the same visual quality as a single 8192x4096 texture, while using 25% less memory in total - and I think you'll note that six 2048² files are probably faster to render than a single large render, because the individual renders will not be hampered so badly by the page file use.

Another major benefit is that a 8192x4096 sized texture requires a video card that supports at least 8192² texture size, while a cubic skybox of same quality can be rendered on a video card that supports meager 2048² texture resolution - which is practically all of them by now.

The added benefit is that you can also render a cubic skybox at 4096² resolution per side, which will provide effective resolution comparable to using a single 16384x8192 spherical texture... without the need to render such a massive texture (although you may still need to use textures of such resolution FOR rendering). I'm sure you can appreciate the possibilities... :p


But keep up the good work, any spherical texture you make can be pretty easily converted to cubic format any time someone would like to use them in game.
There are three things that last forever: Abort, Retry, Fail - and the greatest of these is Fail.

 

Offline fightermedic

  • 29
  • quite a nice guy, no really, i am
Thanks for the feedback Herra, i've played around with all the different ways to render quite a bit, and ended up using single spherical equirectangular textures because that's what blender renders for 360° camera options, and i have not been smart enough to bake the scene to a cube with cycles at first, so i had to refer to camera rendering
by now i know that all you have to do is to set up a cube with a 100% glossy material and bake glossy maps, but i'm sticking with what i've got now ;) especially since it allows for better post processing in gimp if you don't have to worry for so many edges
also, one problem i've always had with textures on cubes is this: if you have a lot of lines in the texture that go over an edge at a 90° angle, then you very clearly can see the edge, as all the lines appear to have a kink

the render process is rather slow since i'm using billions of polygons in this scene, i think there are something like 300k high resolution asteroids alone - memory consumption is quite ok for rendering in fact, but the compositing is abysimal in that regard
and honestly, i don't care for older graphic cards at this point, even my seven year old radeon that i replaced 2 months back could load 8k textures, so there's that...

here's the next one, quite hot so near to the sun:
« Last Edit: August 22, 2014, 09:04:01 am by fightermedic »
>>Fully functional cockpits for Freespace<<
>>Ships created by me<<
Campaigns revised/voice-acted by me:
Lightning Marshal 1-4, The Regulus Campaign, Operation: Savior, Operation: Crucible, Titan Rebellion, Fall of Epsilon Pegasi 1.1Aftermath 2.1,
Pandora's Box 2.2, Deep Blood

Other Campaigns I have participated in:
The Antagonist, Warzone, Phantoms & Echo-Gate

All the stuff I release is free to use or change in any way for everybody who likes to do so; take whatever you need

 

Offline Herra Tohtori

  • The Academic
  • 211
  • Bad command or file name
Thanks for the feedback Herra, i've played around with all the different ways to render quite a bit, and ended up using single spherical equirectangular textures because that's what blender renders for 360° camera options, and i have not been smart enough to bake the scene to a cube with cycles at first, so i had to refer to camera rendering

I've always just used camera rendering - six different shots with 90 degree FOV - and naming the renders appropriately for the mapping of the skybox.

I think you can also render an envmap from blender, and that would be directly compatible with FreeSpaceFreak's GIMP script that outputs properly aligned and positioned textures for the seamless skybox which was made specifically for FSO purposes. But I see you've posted in that thread so if you have other reasons for your workflow, I'm not judging.  :)

Quote
by now i know that all you have to do is to set up a cube with a 100% glossy material and bake glossy maps, but i'm sticking with what i've got now ;) especially since it allows for better post processing in gimp if you don't have to worry for so many edges

Well, yeah, with cube maps you would need to take care not to edit edges directly, but with spherical maps you have to avoid editing the polar regions because you end up creating visible distortions quite easily.

Quote
also, one problem i've always had with textures on cubes is this: if you have a lot of lines in the texture that go over an edge at a 90° angle, then you very clearly can see the edge, as all the lines appear to have a kink

Only if those edges come from post-processing. I prefer to do all stuff bigger than one side of the cube in Blender, and not mess with that in the ready renders. What I do in GIMP is colour/levels editing mostly, and that's uniform across the surface so it causes no distortions.

Quote
the render process is rather slow since i'm using billions of polygons in this scene, i think there are something like 300k high resolution asteroids alone - memory consumption is quite ok for rendering in fact, but the compositing is abysimal in that regard
and honestly, i don't care for older graphic cards at this point, even my seven year old radeon that i replaced 2 months back could load 8k textures, so there's that...


Yeah, if you have good reasons for doing things the way you do - by all means keep doing what you're doing. I just wanted to make sure you know the options available for you.

And, also, since you're making a spherical map (or equirectangular cylindrical as the exact definition goes), your skyboxen would be easily converted to cubic form as well - whoever wants to do it would just need to import your skybox into blender, and render the scene with no lighting onto six cube textures.


Keep up the nice work!
There are three things that last forever: Abort, Retry, Fail - and the greatest of these is Fail.

 

Offline Lorric

  • 212
Just beautiful.

And I love how they're actually going to be a solar system, they're not just by themselves.

 

Offline fightermedic

  • 29
  • quite a nice guy, no really, i am
it seems with the very recent release of CUDA 6.5 by Nvidia, it will soon be possible to render volumes on GPU in blender, this will make Nebulae so much cooler without having to resort to super slow CPU rendering! YAY!

also:
« Last Edit: August 24, 2014, 05:08:18 am by fightermedic »
>>Fully functional cockpits for Freespace<<
>>Ships created by me<<
Campaigns revised/voice-acted by me:
Lightning Marshal 1-4, The Regulus Campaign, Operation: Savior, Operation: Crucible, Titan Rebellion, Fall of Epsilon Pegasi 1.1Aftermath 2.1,
Pandora's Box 2.2, Deep Blood

Other Campaigns I have participated in:
The Antagonist, Warzone, Phantoms & Echo-Gate

All the stuff I release is free to use or change in any way for everybody who likes to do so; take whatever you need

 

Offline fightermedic

  • 29
  • quite a nice guy, no really, i am
this one took 22 hours to render, with only 500 samples
ouch
volumetrics are not fun
>>Fully functional cockpits for Freespace<<
>>Ships created by me<<
Campaigns revised/voice-acted by me:
Lightning Marshal 1-4, The Regulus Campaign, Operation: Savior, Operation: Crucible, Titan Rebellion, Fall of Epsilon Pegasi 1.1Aftermath 2.1,
Pandora's Box 2.2, Deep Blood

Other Campaigns I have participated in:
The Antagonist, Warzone, Phantoms & Echo-Gate

All the stuff I release is free to use or change in any way for everybody who likes to do so; take whatever you need

 
Your work is amazing fightermedic
I swear If there's something I'm interested in to customise my mod, I just need to find one of your threads and bam, you done some really good quality stuff.
Too many ideas.....not enough FREDing time!

 

Offline fightermedic

  • 29
  • quite a nice guy, no really, i am
the last 2 backrounds
solar system complete!
yay!
i will upload all the skyboxes sometime during the nex days
>>Fully functional cockpits for Freespace<<
>>Ships created by me<<
Campaigns revised/voice-acted by me:
Lightning Marshal 1-4, The Regulus Campaign, Operation: Savior, Operation: Crucible, Titan Rebellion, Fall of Epsilon Pegasi 1.1Aftermath 2.1,
Pandora's Box 2.2, Deep Blood

Other Campaigns I have participated in:
The Antagonist, Warzone, Phantoms & Echo-Gate

All the stuff I release is free to use or change in any way for everybody who likes to do so; take whatever you need

 

Offline fightermedic

  • 29
  • quite a nice guy, no really, i am
>>Fully functional cockpits for Freespace<<
>>Ships created by me<<
Campaigns revised/voice-acted by me:
Lightning Marshal 1-4, The Regulus Campaign, Operation: Savior, Operation: Crucible, Titan Rebellion, Fall of Epsilon Pegasi 1.1Aftermath 2.1,
Pandora's Box 2.2, Deep Blood

Other Campaigns I have participated in:
The Antagonist, Warzone, Phantoms & Echo-Gate

All the stuff I release is free to use or change in any way for everybody who likes to do so; take whatever you need

 

Offline Rheyah

  • 28
  • Will release something one day. Promise.
You are an amazing creature, Mr Medicfighter.

 

Offline fightermedic

  • 29
  • quite a nice guy, no really, i am
yo folks, news:
i'm very much in the process of rendering all the boxes for the 2nd star system:
here is some glimpse at the first bunch that is already finished:

too bad the image resolution is so low at p3d for free accs :/
>>Fully functional cockpits for Freespace<<
>>Ships created by me<<
Campaigns revised/voice-acted by me:
Lightning Marshal 1-4, The Regulus Campaign, Operation: Savior, Operation: Crucible, Titan Rebellion, Fall of Epsilon Pegasi 1.1Aftermath 2.1,
Pandora's Box 2.2, Deep Blood

Other Campaigns I have participated in:
The Antagonist, Warzone, Phantoms & Echo-Gate

All the stuff I release is free to use or change in any way for everybody who likes to do so; take whatever you need

 

Offline wookieejedi

  • 29
  • Intensify Forward Firepower
So ridiculously awesome!!

 

Offline ngld

  • Administrator
  • 29
  • Knossos dev
I had some fun with JavaScript and WebGL...
Now you can preview these skyboxes in their full quality: https://dev.tproxy.de/fs2/skyboxes/
Just select the skybox in the upper-right dropdown menu. You can click and drag to look around and scroll to zoom.

 

Offline Spoon

  • 212
  • ヾ(´︶`♡)ノ
Axem reminded me these existed, thanks to that cool link of ngld.
These skyboxes look great, gj fightermedic!

Can I use some these? (Though I'd probably cut down those 8192x4096 png maps down to size a bit)
Urutorahappī!!

[02:42] <@Axem> spoon somethings wrong
[02:42] <@Axem> critically wrong
[02:42] <@Axem> im happy with these missions now
[02:44] <@Axem> well
[02:44] <@Axem> with 2 of them

 

Offline fightermedic

  • 29
  • quite a nice guy, no really, i am
I had some fun with JavaScript and WebGL...
Now you can preview these skyboxes in their full quality: https://dev.tproxy.de/fs2/skyboxes/
Just select the skybox in the upper-right dropdown menu. You can click and drag to look around and scroll to zoom.

woah, awesome dude!
gonna include the link in the first post

@Spoon
you can use and change them however you want, as is actually stated in the OP ;) use those imported from homeworld at your own peril, however ;)
>>Fully functional cockpits for Freespace<<
>>Ships created by me<<
Campaigns revised/voice-acted by me:
Lightning Marshal 1-4, The Regulus Campaign, Operation: Savior, Operation: Crucible, Titan Rebellion, Fall of Epsilon Pegasi 1.1Aftermath 2.1,
Pandora's Box 2.2, Deep Blood

Other Campaigns I have participated in:
The Antagonist, Warzone, Phantoms & Echo-Gate

All the stuff I release is free to use or change in any way for everybody who likes to do so; take whatever you need