several people asked me, how I came up with dm_dry's new skybox. In this post, I will describe how to create skyboxes for any 3d game.
You need either
- a good camera, a tripod, a cool location and a panorama stiching software such as hugin (open source, free to use!), which can assemble a large panorama of several individual pictures,
- an existing high definition panorama (ideally somewhere around 4096x1500) under a suitable license which allows free use and derivative work, e.g. CC3
For a guide, consider reading this guide on how to make your own SkyBox with a digital camera. If you have a suitable HD panorama, you may skip the steps concerning the panorama's assembly.
For dm_dry's new background, I used this nice picture of wikipedia. If you look closely, you'll notice, the original isn't a 360° degree panorama. However, with the help of Gimp, I managed to fake a 360° degree panorama out of it.
The result you can experience on dm_dry on Baller Bude, best viewed with \r_picmip 0 and vid_restart.
At anybody who wants to contribute: the most difficult task is to search or assemble a 360° HD panorama. The remaining tasks are mechanical. The program Nona, which is a part of hugin, splits a given panorama into six faces. Resolution-wise, Nona expects an aspect ration of 4:2. I used the following .pto file:
- Code: Select all
p n"TIFF_m" v90 h1024 w1024
i n"monument_valley.tiff" f4 v360 y-90 p0 h2410 w4820
i n"monument_valley.tiff" f4 v360 y90 p0 h2410 w4820
i n"monument_valley.tiff" f4 v360 y0 p-90 h2410 w4820
i n"monument_valley.tiff" f4 v360 y0 p90 h2410 w4820
i n"monument_valley.tiff" f4 v360 y0 p0 h2410 w4820
i n"monument_valley.tiff" f4 v360 y180 p0 h2410 w4820
v
The numbers have the following meaning: w4820 and h2410 are the width and height of my 360° panorama I've faked, h1024 w1024 are the resolution of the individual faces.
The bash script I used to create the faces were:
nona -o face sky.pto
convert face0000.tif drydesertsky_ft.jpg
convert face0001.tif drydesertsky_bk.jpg
#convert face0002.tif drydesertsky_up.jpg
#convert face0003.tif drydesertsky_dn.jpg
convert face0004.tif drydesertsky_rt.jpg
convert face0005.tif drydesertsky_lf.jpg
I used Imagemagick's convert to turn the images into JPG format. You'll may notice I didn't convert the up and down faces. That's because I replaced them with a single color image. You'll never see the bottom in dm_dry and the sky is simply a certain shade of blue. For that to happen, I selected the upper part of the sky with Gimp's magic wand tool. It select similar colors and I used it to select all the sky above the clouds and turned it into a single color.
To view the results, you need to assemble the drydesertsky_*.jpg images in the zzbackground.pk3 named ZIP-archive, placed in your smokinguns user directory. For that to go right, look at the existing background images in sg_pak0.pk3 to exactly imitate file name and directory structure.
I encourage you to try making a skybox yourself.
- It's very rewarding,
- I'll be at your disposal for any further questions/help and
- I'll promise to include your work into Baller Bude, if you like it to be used and it surpasses the quality of the previous background it substitutes.
