n00b mapper skybox question

[SEPtIc cHiLD]

ok I'm kinda new to mapping so soz if this is a stupid question...

 

ok I've got my ambient light set on 0, which I want to keep at 0, but I can't see any of the sky textures, they're just black..in darkness. I thought some sky textures were meant be light emitting, tried em all...they all look black. Am I retarded?

[Wes Marrakesh]

Only ones that same *name*_light will emit light.

For exapmle, kejim_light will emit light but kejim won't.

[SEPtIc cHiLD]

ahh right..cheers man, yeah I was being retarded. Sorted now.

[Takeoffyouhoser]

Hey Wes...

 

I have downloaded a custom skybox....The instructions are for quake 3...how the heck do i use it for Jo?

[Leslie Judge]

I wrote about this somewhere here in this forum.

 

About the custom sky boxes

 

You need the six pictures and a sky shader. The best, if you go to your base/shaders directory, and look into the skies.shader. There can be found all the skyboxes like bespin, yavin, kejim_light (this is with light from the sky), etc.

 

Make your own shader file and copy one of the skies for example bespin. It's like this:

 

textures/skies/bespin
{
qer_editorimage	textures/skies/sky.tga
surfaceparm	sky
surfaceparm	noimpact
surfaceparm	nomarks
notc
q3map_nolightmap
skyParms	textures/skies/bespin 512 -
}

 

Now you have to modify the first line's middle part if you don't want your skybox to appear in the Skies texture set. If it's OK for you then leave it. If you change it, don't forget to create a directory with the same name in the textures directory.

 

The third part of the line is the name of your shader.

 

The most important is the last line. There is the path to the six files that make up the skybox. As you can see there is only the relative path from base directory and only the base of the files' name. So if you have a morningsky_dn, etc. you have to write only morningsky.

 

If you want your sky to emit light you have to add the following line after the qer_editorimage line:

 

q3map_surfacelight <intensity>

 

With this the whole sky will emit light. If you want sunlight, then you can combine the above line with this one:

 

q3map_sun <red> <green> <blue> <intensity> <degrees> <elevation>

[Takeoffyouhoser]

yeah, but you never told me how to unzip the file into which directories they go into... you just told me about the shader...

[Leslie Judge]

Sorry.

 

Is it clear now? Anyway I make a sum about that. Somebody may find it useful.

 

So, you have a texture set (for example: evening) with the six files: evening_bk, evening_dn, evening_ft, evening_lf, evening_rt, evening_up. The extension (probably .jpg) does not matter this time.

 

You put these into a folder in you textures directory. Say that your map is called monday.map. So you probably will have a directory in textures called monday. Put the six files into that.

 

This is not a rule, just an advice. Some people make a subdierctory for skies called env in the textures/<mapname>. As you can see above the files can be anywhere within the base directory, since you can enter the path for them in the shader file.

 

Oh, for Radiant, you should put your shader files's name into the shaders/shaderlist.txt.

 

Hope this time I was helpful.