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Background/Skydome? .EDF

Started by BadStar, January 26, 2017, 02:29:23 AM

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BadStar

Am I missing a tutorial about background.edf?

Seems like I remember a conversation about a sphere/skydome used to make the sky or background?


Couple immediate issues:

I made a half sphere/sky dome in SkUp but when I add the picture, it only fills in a section or splits the pic up.

If I ever figure out adding a pic to the dome, how do I get the file into .edf format?
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𝖙𝖋𝖈

Starting with the simple question, you make the edf the same as you would make your scenery.edf.  Export as dae, sket2fbx, fbx2edf.

I struggled with skies and SU. I tried cutting a sphere in half and using project texture (similar to the way the heightmap gradient works when doing geolocation) but you get a lot of stretching.

I made the Paleta skydomes using SU and for those I made a cylinder for the sky gradient with a flat top of solid colour. Think being inside an upside down coffee mug instead of being inside a dome. Since skydomes aren't affected by shadows you could make the dome a pentagon if you wanted.

I found at least using SU that I wasn't getting good quality clouds or sun, so I made these their own textured objects and placed them inside the skydome with their flat sides facing the origin. There are tons of good clouds on Google images of you search for 'cloud texture transparent' or 'cloud texture alpha'. Just make sure they're power of two, import them as a plane and place them.

So to recap, it doesn't have to be a dome in shape, it can be a pyramid for all mxb cares. Just make sure it goes down far enough past the horizon line so you don't get black empty space. And for best results build your sky scene as if it's going to be viewed from the origin. Than export as you normally would your scenery but it stops after fbx2add has made 'clearsky.edf' and doesn't need to be map.batted. It can be in your project folder too, you should be able to see it in mapview.

As for background, it works just the same. I made the Paleta background out of 8 2k images in an octagon again around the origin in SU. Since I wanted high quality, I found a spot on Google Earth that I liked (flat floor but surrounded by mountain features) exported a bunch of super high res images with all GEs settings on max, stitched them together in gimp, made a gradient from the bottom to get rid of close features, made the sky transparent, cut the image into 8 pieces and built them together in SU.

This can then be exported the same way as the sky, it doesn't need to be map.batted and should be visible as the background from both your project folder or your in game track folder in mapview.

One problem I had was the background.edf was receiving shading, which made it look horrible in some spots. I decided at the time to make it part of the skybox model, but I think pib has fixed that so now you shouldn't have that problem.

Hope that helps dude.. I really should make more tutorials but I get too engrossed in making things.

Oh, and learn Blender :p

BadStar

That's great information!

I think that's about all the tutorial on that(basically)that I need..Thx!


and I like the idea of learning blender but as you know the curve is much steeper to learn... I am just getting "basic/simple" tracks produced which has been learning every little thing just to get a single track.. I have never used any modeling/terrain building/texturing/photo editing program or anything really. Now that I can get a track out I want to do a couple and hard wire something bbefore I go an explode my head more with blender(Although I trust you on it).


Thx again!
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pacopastor34



sloofa

Why the clearsky.edf doesn't work on my track, even on the example track????
There is still some default sky. On other tracks it works correctly.

|BEYER|

in your .amb have you removed the asterisk '*' eg:
   sky = *clearsky.edf
should be like this if you want to load your own skydome:
   sky = clearsky.edf

sloofa

Quote from: |BEYER| on January 05, 2021, 04:35:21 PMin your .amb have you removed the asterisk '*' eg:
   sky = *clearsky.edf
should be like this if you want to load your own skydome:
   sky = clearsky.edf

that's it, thanks a lot