custom sky shader

[pakmannen]

i know it is possible, but i have no idea how to do it. is there a tuturial or something?

 

oh, and if i fail, is there anybody willing to do a sky shader for me? very simple one, just a gold coloured sky thing.

[Xzzy]

make six textures, one for each face of the skybox. Name each one like they are in the existing textures dir.. sky_up, sky_dn, sky_ft, etc etc.

 

Then copy an existing shader (in the shaders directory, cleverly named as skies.shaders) to one of your own. Rename the shader to something of your choice (textures/skies/mysky for example, the first line of the shader definition). Point the shader at your textures (the skyparms variable), then use it in radiant.

 

Presto, custom sky.

[pakmannen]

yea, but how can i change the lighting that emits from it?

i would like a more golden color than the bespin orange one.

 

thanks so far!

[Wes Marrakesh]

well, either i doing skybox wrong, or the bespin sky does NOT emit light

[pakmannen]

use the sky_light

 

but how do i alter colour?

[Xzzy]

textures by default emit light the color of the actual textures. You can edit this with surfaceparms if you want.

 

As far as I can recall, skies in jk2 aren't configured to emit light. Yes, they are glowing, meaning that you can always see skies no matter how dark the actual map is, but I've yet to see a sky in jk2 that actually lit other brushes.

 

You can alter that (I think, never tried it) by specifying a q3map_surfacelight parm in the shader definition, but I doubt you'll like the results.

 

If what you really want is to simulate a sun beaming down onto your map, what you want is to use the q3map_sun surfaceparm.

 

That is discussed here:

 

http://www.heppler.com/shader/shader/section4.htm#4.4

 

Results of this kind of effect are illustrated here:

 

http://www.planetquake.com/6thfloor/asp/content.asp?name=skybox

 

The effect is basically putting a really really bright spotlight at some arbitrary position over your map. The effect can be quite cool.

[Wes Marrakesh]

Originally posted by pakmannen

use the sky_light

is that the name of the sky or is it, say, yavin_light?

and why do my sky textures tile?

[Xzzy]

Originally posted by Wes Marrakesh

and why do my sky textures tile?

 

Because you're not supposed to set an actual texture on your sky. Instead you set a shader on the brush and let the game apply the texture.

 

In the skies texture set, amidst all the graphic files, there should be non textured "textures" with the names of the various skies. That is what you apply to your brush.

[Wes Marrakesh]

so for bespin i apply bespin or something close?

[Xzzy]

well now that I'm at home and can actually test the stuff I'm talking about, yes, that is how you use the orange bespin sky.

 

Any texture (speaking about gtkradiant here, I don't use j2kradiant) that has the "SKY" graphic can be used as, well, a sky.