Skies of ARGH (-cadia) - Solved!

(Grand_Mister_P) #1

Basically im getting to the final stages of making my first map and are now looking into how to make a realistic sky.

http://www.splashdamage.com/index.php?name=pnPHPbb2&file=viewtopic&p=71500#71500

I had a looksie at that and it confused the hell out of me, i dont want to make it custom i just want a sky like one used in game but have no idea how to go about it. Ive currently just got a plain old skybox. Which, to be blunt, looks poo! I could bevel the corners or something i suppose, but theres still the fact that artillery and air strikes dont work at all as well. Im fairly new to mapping and would appreciate some one giving a step by step kind of thing to make a very basic sky that looks ok and lets FO work! Or tell me its identical to that link i popped in earlier, or something please!

Thanks

(Drakir) #2

The basics of getting a normal sky working is very simple.
Just add a ‘sky’ shader to the surface u want to have as a sky.
Working shaders can be found in the ‘skies’ texture folder. (A texture that has a shader attached to it can be recognized by the white outline in the texture view window)

To check that a certain shader is a sky shader u can SHIFT+Click the texture in the texture browser to open the shader file in notepad. A sky shader have “surfaceparm sky” set in it.

When i create a sky i usually apply the sky shader to only 1 surface of the brush and have the rest of them caulked. But this can cause problems with aistrikes, so to make sure airstrikes will work, select the top brush and cover it all with the sky shader.

Dont worry that the sky looks awfull and tiled in the editor, it will look fine ingame. Some working skies doesnt even have a working editor image, so it will just show the “shader image missing” texture on the surface. If im not wrong the sd_siwa shader works fine but has no editor image set.

Hope i am making any sence here!

(Grand_Mister_P) #3

Yes, that sounds fine thank you very much ill go try it in a minute, but what about the sides of my sky box?
Maybe this is where the problem is… the tops of the sides of my sky box are visible. Ive encased the main bit of the map thats played, and then took the scenery out a bit, hence you can still see the tops. What next then?

Thanks

(pgh) #4

As much sence as sense… :wink: