Tutorial for Skybox and Skyboxi?

[angelodeasa]

I can install them in a track... Position them correctly... But when you check in the ingame camera's, they look awful and pixelated and sometimes clipping some of the structure objects...

Anybody has a tutorial of making a correct placement of the skybox and skyboxi... I will surely appreciate any help or tips...

[mianiak]

Have you looked at the track making tutorial? http://www.mbdevteam.com/download/tu..._by_scottj.rar
I think the pixelation thing is,, in the material settings you need to select 'No Detail Reduction' and when you save the sky texture choose no mip maps.

[angelodeasa]

mannnn... you always come thru for me bro! ima try this now

[JorgeANeto]

Have you looked at the track making tutorial? http://www.mbdevteam.com/download/tu..._by_scottj.rar
I think the pixelation thing is,, in the material settings you need to select 'No Detail Reduction' and when you save the sky texture choose no mip maps.

Hm, that's a interesting find, I've never play around with this propertie "no detail reduction". Probably it's a bit fps consuming, I guess?

[mianiak]

Hm, that's a interesting find, I've never play around with this propertie "no detail reduction". Probably it's a bit fps consuming, I guess?

I really don't know 100% how it works as I haven't played with it much, but I presume you only use it with things you don't want to lose detail, like the sky and maybe terrain if you use an overhead pic. I only know to do this because I looked at how default ISI tracks are made.

[JorgeANeto]

The Scott's tutorial is not very detailed on "Skyboxes" section. He just says to write "sky.tga" in slot name but "T1 lerp T2" shader has two texture slots. I can't figure out how manage it in 3dsMax. Should I clone the map for both slots, including animation parameters?

Obviously there's no "sky.dds" or "sky.tga" anywhere, including commonmaps.mas file.

I see most people satisfied to "borrow" skyboxes from here and there but I've never seen nothing more detailed about texture animations.

[mianiak]

The Scott's tutorial is not very detailed on "Skyboxes" section. He just says to write "sky.tga" in slot name but "T1 lerp T2" shader has two texture slots. I can't figure out how manage it in 3dsMax. Should I clone the map for both slots, including animation parameters?

Obviously there's no "sky.dds" or "sky.tga" anywhere, including commonmaps.mas file.

I see most people satisfied to "borrow" skyboxes from here and there but I've never seen nothing more detailed about texture animations.

Ok, I will do a bit of 'thinking out loud' here (so don't take this as gospel), I have looked into this, but I still don't understand it fully, so I will type what I think and hope it can help clear it up a bit.

You don't actually need sky.dds (I don't know why or how) I think those names are used to name the animation.

The animation uses sky files from the commonmaps.mas or you can build your own. Infact you don't even need to make a sky tex. at all because all you need is in the commonmaps.mas. The only reason you would make your own sky is if the location had a certain unique thing.

I think the main textures used are sky01 (day) and sky04 (night), the rest I think are for dusk and dawn which aren't turned on for long.
I think the lerping is not a static blend, but a way to cause a fade.
If you look at the animation,,,
t1- (0,0,1,1,2,3,4)
t2- (1,2,2,3,3,4,0)
You can see that it is offset.

Here are the material properties from the track sample piece that comes with rftools v1.


The sky textures themselves are beyond my understanding on how they are made. I think they are similar to how a cube map is made or something like that. But in some cases I see just plain dxt1 sky's made so I don't think how they are made is important.
You see the thumbnails from common mas show some fancy thing, but when you open them they all look normal. You can see the file format, bottom left of each wtv window.




So that's about all the knowledge I can share about this. I hope it helps somewhat.

[JorgeANeto]

Great Miniak, you're a very collaborative track modder, that’s so unusual.
I wish I had read those explanations two days before; it’d save a lot of time. But it’s still very handy post. The key of your post is here:

t2- (1,2,2,3,3,4,0)

Without these settings for second texture slot, the skybox turns weird and won’t work properly in game. Now, I’m able to build a skybox from scratch.

Just in addition to your valuable information above, some points that I collected after I was struggled on skyboxes thing:

1. It is necessary to create either “sky.dds” or “sky.tga” in order to allow GMT converter export the objects. It doesn’t matter its content but it might be a copy of the first transitional texture (sky00.dds) renamed as “sky.dds” for example. It will be useful for texture mapping purposes. When the track was eventually completed, this texture may be deleted because GMotor2 pick up sky00.dds directly; the engine bypasses the texture which is assigned at slots materials (sky.dds or sky.tga).

2. I’m guessing that you must use SKY as mandatory material name because that one is hardcoded by ISI. I tried to create a fading city skyline, from dawn to night, but no success (probably because of material name, not sky – still studying that case).

3. Create sky custom textures is easy. Go up to any building roof and take a sequence of pictures trying to cover 360°, join them in Photoshop and use Filter-> distort -> polar coordinates, resize the image to 2048 x 2048 px and that’s it. In case of night sky I suggest to create a layer for stars only after to apply the Filter otherwise the stars will appear weird. You will want to map the sky textures using UVWMap-> Planar. It’s done.

4. The button “select and link” has to be used in 3ds Max. Deselect everything, now click on “select and link”, select all dependencies and drag and drop to the skyboxi object. It’s enough to create the linked object how we can see in SCN files.

Let’s see now how the number sequences actually works and I think the skybox subject would be busted.

Thanks again.

[LesiU]

Some time ago I did some tests with that animation sequence, trying to figure out how it works.. but I failed
I did 4 solid colored textures (like pink, green, blue, yellow), run timescaled session and noted down exact times for all texture transistions during that 24h period, but found no obvious connection with anim sequence

Yes, lerp is used here for fading (which gives pretty good results).

[mianiak]

Thanks for the kind words Jorge



@LesiU, Try using the scene viewer, all you have to do it press a button to change the sky. It makes it a lot faster.
------

This is from the gMotor Viewer help.

---------------------------------------------
Time-of-day controls


Time-of-day controls are used to adjust the direction and color of the scene lighting, and sky transitions if present and properly setup. Transition take place over a 3-second interval, and can be paused (frozen) by hitting the same key again.



· F1 – transition from night to dawn (sunrise) phase

· F2 – transition from dawn to day (sunny) phase

· F3 – transition from day to dusk (sunset) phase

· F4 – transition from dusk to night phase

· Backspace – transition to the next phase. The phase order is dawn, day, dusk, night.
----------------------------------------------------

[JorgeANeto]

Indeed, my tests also were useless so far.

First, it would be important to know how this shader works, and I don't know. Probably there's something to "Dst Color" and "Inverse Dst Color" thing, but who knows? We are not asked to change transparency parameters and it still works.

Maybe only an hexadecimal expert could be clarify it by taking a look into shader code itself.

[JorgeANeto]

http://http.developer.nvidia.com/CgT...chapter07.html

It seems Lerp procedure has 3 parameters to manage, they probably are built in ot those numbers.


http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/libr...(v=vs.85).aspx

[LesiU]

Thanks mianiak, but I was talking about figuring out the lerp animation sequence provided in the material properties for sky dome.

JorgeANeto. For me, it looks like a direct reference to all 5 (0-4) textures. Lerping is about linear transition between two points which rF is using for transitions between each texture change, so that's not the case (well, at least in my opinion). I'll ask my friend to have a look into the shader code. Maybe he will find anwers to our questions? Stay tuned.

[JorgeANeto]

Surely LesliU, I'm looking forward some wise tips, let's see.

I was looking into "Cycle" animation event and the numbers matches directly of textures' loading order but on "Manual" (shown as "Lerp" into Simed) the thing is more tricky.

Thanks mianiak, but I was talking about figuring out the lerp animation sequence provided in the material properties for sky dome.

JorgeANeto. For me, it looks like a direct reference to all 5 (0-4) textures. Lerping is about linear transition between two points which rF is using for transitions between each texture change, so that's not the case (well, at least in my opinion). I'll ask my friend to have a look into the shader code. Maybe he will find anwers to our questions? Stay tuned.

[LesiU]

Shader is doing only Lerping on two textures (and RGBA color) that it receives from the GFX engine, so it is the engine, that interprets the sequence directly. You can try and ask ISI directly about that. Maybe this time they will help you. I tried, about a year ago, and they said that they don't remember that already, so they have no idea how it works

[JorgeANeto]

Shader is doing only Lerping on two textures (and RGBA color) that it receives from the GFX engine, so it is the engine, that interprets the sequence directly. You can try and ask ISI directly about that. Maybe this time they will help you. I tried, about a year ago, and they said that they don't remember that already, so they have no idea how it works

I tried ask once, about another subject, but no sucess... It looks like some developpers of ISI team has gone times ago (and part of knowledge toghether)

We have to figure those points alone, I'm aware of it

[blakboks]

Awesome addition, Mianiak! I've been following the tutorials floating around, and I didn't see anywhere where they mentioned the T2 animation sequence. I was scratching my head until I (re)stumbled on this thread. The order in which my skys were showing up was not the same I was getting on any other other track, plus it would flash white during the transition from sky to sky. Using that animation sequence for T2 fixed it perfectly! Hopefully the tutorial-makers will take note and add this info to their tut's. I'm starting to compile a list of notes on track building. This one has definitely made it in!

Thanks again,
Chris

[taufikp]

After creating a sphere and give it a sky texture, I still can't see the sky properly, what I see is only the blue color (part of the sky tex) and no clouds at all. Maybe there's a problem with my UVWmap? And how to do this in proper way? All other properties already set as in ISI's tutorial and in this post.

[taufikp]

After creating a sphere and give it a sky texture, I still can't see the sky properly, what I see is only the blue color (part of the sky tex) and no clouds at all. Maybe there's a problem with my UVWmap? And how to do this in proper way? All other properties already set as in ISI's tutorial and in this post.

Fix the problem, turns out I need to flip the normal. Works fine, but the sky animation is still working incorrectly and too fast. The animation is backwards I think (night is day, and day is night).