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[Hellfire_RWS]

Just some fun playing with skydomes and remapped Skydomes

Modifié par Hellfire_RWS, 06 septembre 2010 - 03:46 .

[MasterChanger]

O_O 

(This forum doesn't seem to have a good emoticon for eyes popping out of one's head.)

That's just awesome! The mountains! They sky! The sky! The mountains!

For those who don't know much about skydomes, how resource-intensive is using this finely-detailed a skydome in an in-game area? I ask both in terms of the resulting memory footprint of the area and the graphics-rendering requirements on the user's end.

I have an area in my PW that I would love to use a skydome like this for, but it may not be practical...

[Hellfire_RWS]

I really dont know the answer to those questions. It runs fine on my machine, which isnt much



P4 3.4D

1Gb nvidia 8600GT

4GB Ram

Win 7 64 bit.



I woudl be happy to make you a test sky and you can run performance test on it.

[Banshe]

Great stuff Hellfire! If you feel like releasing them after your fun, I'm sure they would be well used.

[BigfootNZ]

Nice one. good resolution.

Did you use a custom Skydome model or the overly geometery heavy Obsidian one?  Also was it done (if a custom model) using the Skybox mapping system in Max where you effectivly project a 3d scene onto 6 sides of a UV box or do you do yours by using the polar coordinate filter trick in Photoshop? Might I suggest giving the base of the skydome a gradient fill so it blends in with what ever color fog the area uses.

Edit:- opps i notice its the obsidian two identical halves UV mapped skydome, i can see the seams!. nice all the same.

[Hellfire_RWS]

BigfootNZ wrote...

Nice one. good resolution.

Did you use a custom Skydome model or the overly geometery heavy Obsidian one? 

Yep I used that poly heavy half sphere.

 

Also was it done (if a custom model) using the Skybox mapping system in Max where you effectivly project a 3d scene onto 6 sides of a UV box or do you do yours by using the polar coordinate filter trick in Photoshop?

polar coordinate 

 Might I suggest giving the base of the skydome a gradient fill so it blends in with what ever color fog the area uses.

Excellant idea

Edit:- opps i notice its the obsidian two identical halves UV mapped skydome, i can see the seams!. nice all the same.

Its not mirrored, I just didnt give that section of the image as much attention as I should have. It was jsut a fun quick test to see how an image would render on the skydome.  I expected it to be very pixelated.

I need to look more at how skydomes work. I would like to set up a photoshop file that would have skies for the different times of day, in sub folders in the file. each would also have filters to adjsut the horizon to meet the time of day.  Then all I would have to do is cut out what I want on the horizon and paste it into each needed layer to make the different times of day.  I have one serious worry though. the sun and moon.  Im betting they will be visible in front of the horizon item

[dunniteowl]

I don't know HF, about the sun moon issue, but I though in the regular skyboxes or skyrings or whatever they're originally called, they have mountains and forest, both of which stick up pretty 'high' along the horizon and I don't recall any bleedthrough effects per se. Then again, I definitely wasn't paying attention to that, so...

dno

[Hellfire_RWS]

Those are a seperate model that sits between the edge of the world and the skydome itself.



At first I tried to put an image on them and use an alpha to cut out the shape, but it didnt not work at all. The image in the video is painted directly on to the sky.

[dunniteowl]

Oh, well then, you're prolly right about having the sun.moon pass in front of that. Too bad you can't make a 'transparent' placeable card that would still block the sun and moon light from showing through. Maybe a placeable card that only shows one side? Then turn it around backwards along the East and West edges of the map for these beautiful skydomes? That way it would allow you as a player to see through the back side and block light passing through from the front (like being on the 'inside' of a placeable building?) Then you could scale them to match the apparent height of the mountains on average? Or even make a cutout that matches the mountains?

Just flinging out crazy WAGs here.

dunniteowl

[Hellfire_RWS]

Hmm what about a double layer skydome.. hmmm

[ArtEChoke]

Separate the mountains onto a sky ring, and go full bleed with the sky box. It might not be totally convincing if you're sitting there watching the sun/moon, but at least you won't see the sun come erupting out of the Earth.

[Friar]

Is there a list of all the existing skydomes?



I only know of the

fx_skydome_generic

fx_skydome_shadow

fx_skydome_astral

fx_skydome_fugue

fx_skydome_dream

[BigfootNZ]

Hellfire_RWS wrote...

Hmm what about a double layer skydome.. hmmm

I was always under the impression that skydomes in NWN2 where the same for NWN1 in that they replace the old. By that I mean a skydome in NWN2 replaces the procedual sky which includes the orbiting sun and moon... the only thing that is the same between them is the dynamic light movement.

So a Skydome doesnt have any moving sun or moon in it, although I havent ever tried a day night sequence with two different skydomes... do they fade between each other like NWN1?... also if its like the old NWN1 skydomes it can only use a single texture, not sure about models, since in NWN1 you could have other things in your skyboxs, but all had to us a single texture if i remeber rightly.

I havent had much issue with that personally simply on the fact that my work is for a plannar based module... and lucky for me most planes have no Sun, Moon or any form of dynamic directional light  and only a direct lighting from above (or in the case of Cacerai... from bellow).

Also what size resolution do you work with the original panoramic picture, since polar co-ordinates filter is incredably losey and blurs the image to hell and back unless you start off as large as you possibly can. Also how did you get the obsidian skydome mesh (which is cylindrical uv mapped?) remapped for polar co-ords in PS?... I remade my skydomes and more or less planar mapped it, then cylindrical polar co-ord the uv map with the uv's rendered on em then stuck the texture back into max and moved the skydomes uv's around to the new polar co-dord'd UV map... works well but still has pinching at the domes apex, although its not to hard to hide with a little paint.

Ive personally been mulling over just using the cubic environment projection(?) feature in Max, create the sky dome as a 3D model which allows me to use other models such as hand made landscapes and proper alpha textures for blending, then projecting the whole thing onto a cube, then stich the 6 resultant textures into a single one and map it onto a cube.... less polys, although it has its issues as well

Now if only the NWN2 horizon billboards could take textures.

Edit:- Grrrr now i have a hankering to fiddle with some skydomes damn you !!! ... when I really wanted to finnish getting all these 500 damn spells into my Spell 2da today **shakes fist **

Modifié par BigfootNZ, 15 septembre 2010 - 11:09 .

[M. Rieder]

Any chance a finished product will be around inthe next 3-5 months? This horizon would be excellent for The Wizard's Apprentice II.

[Hellfire_RWS]

I could release it whenever, but it would be a static sky, It would be better if i Made the other times of day

[Friar]

I actually need a static skydome for a sunset overlooking Huzuz The City of Delight in Zakhara. I'm wondering what I need to do to make one of these skydomes. I have .netpaint and I have 2da and hak tools. I just need to know specific dimensions or any other tidbits.



Day, time, and positions of the sun or moon are not important for this becuase the pc will only be there for a short while. This is for the beginning of an adventure in the Al-Qadim Forgotten Realms. The pc is leaving the City of Delights to go to Halwa which is a little more austere and at the mouth of a big desert. I couldn't find golden Arabian dome placeables so and this gave me an idea.

[kamalpoe]

koundog1 wrote...

I actually need a static skydome for a sunset overlooking Huzuz The City of Delight in Zakhara. I'm wondering what I need to do to make one of these skydomes. I have .netpaint and I have 2da and hak tools. I just need to know specific dimensions or any other tidbits.

Day, time, and positions of the sun or moon are not important for this becuase the pc will only be there for a short while. This is for the beginning of an adventure in the Al-Qadim Forgotten Realms. The pc is leaving the City of Delights to go to Halwa which is a little more austere and at the mouth of a big desert. I couldn't find golden Arabian dome placeables so and this gave me an idea.

Unless you need something really specific, it would probably be easier to turn off the daynight cycle and set the default lighting to what you want. You can export individual daynight settings, so export a sunset that you like.

[Friar]

@Kamalpoe,



I could do that, but then the player wouldn't see a large Arabian city next to a sea. I'm working on a tga right now I just don't know what size it should be set for. I'm doing alot of collage with cutting and pasting images to a beautiful sunset next to a sea. Looks cheesy though.



It just seems a lot easier to me to do it this way rather than drafting new models and meshes for billowing ivory towers and golden pointed domes.

[Hellfire_RWS]

the image for the default OEI skydome should be at min 1024x1024. My above example with non mirrored horizon is a custom mapped dome for Polar coordinates using a 1024x2048. I also have a custom mapped Skydome for cylinder mapping,



I have used images as big os 2048x2048 for skydomes without any performance hit that I noticed

[dunniteowl]

Well, I'm willing to bet that the skydome can be quite detailed and high resolution. It should only load on initial module load, so you shouldn't have to worry about the performance hit until you get into serious high resolution (mayber greater than 2048x4096 as a guess.) The 'hit' should be exacted only during module load or in transition from interior to exterior (which is a transition so ignore my redundancy please please.)

Once loaded -- it's there. At least, that's how I presume it works based on the way a module loads and the rendering engine works.

dno

[BigfootNZ]

dunniteowl wrote...

Well, I'm willing to bet that the skydome can be quite detailed and high resolution. It should only load on initial module load, so you shouldn't have to worry about the performance hit until you get into serious high resolution (mayber greater than 2048x4096 as a guess.) The 'hit' should be exacted only during module load or in transition from interior to exterior (which is a transition so ignore my redundancy please please.)
Once loaded -- it's there. At least, that's how I presume it works based on the way a module loads and the rendering engine works.
dno

Id say thats true, I dont understand it fully myself, but I wouldnt worry to much about a sky domes over all dimensions since its a single, or should be a single draw call which is what really hits performance.

ie if you have a model made up of 3-4 parts and each part has its own diffuse, normal, tint, glow map texture, each one of those takes up its file size in GPU memory (it might be more might be less but id assume its the file size roughly) each one of those textures and parts is a seperate draw call to the GPU... the more calls you require the slower it takes for the GPU to render a complete frame, hence a FPS hit.

It also means that now days with multiple shaders and textures, performance is more a texture issue than a polygon one (unless the engine just isnt good at big polycounts)... I cant remeber but I read something a while back that also mentioned a few other instances of how draw calls are setup which made me think f things in NWN2... although that was for the UT3 engine, but id wager all game engines these days run on similar principals, or should (then again if you look at how NWN2 runs and how UT3 runs and both of them where released within a year of each other i think the NWN2 graphics engine was more or less a cludge effort). I only bring that up since I think NWN2 might have issues with things like that (along with a rather lazy and overly distant object culling issue, nothing like having your FPS drop by 20 points when yoru camera is pointed in a particular direction simply because 10 or more npc models are sitting on the edge of the clipping plane, but are completely invisible to the player but the engine hasnt 'faded' them out, why an unscaled npc remains visible from up to 100+ feet from the character is beyond me... wonder if that distance is hardcoded...

I wouldnt go over 2024 however for a texture since im not sure if theirs a limit, ive never seen anyone going more than that for a texture size. I know for a long time rectangle based textures couldnt work in game engines or if they did they where extremely inefficient since the gpu would store it as a sqaure and just fill up the other half of the sqaure with nothing, wasting twice the required memory for that texture on the the GPU. Not sure if you can have two textures or two meshs in a skydome in NWN2 since that would mean you could go with two 1024's and cut your textures memory print in half and the texture wouldnt be so squashed horizontaly giving you more detail width wise (since a skydomes circumfrance is far greater than its hieght in most cases).

**Comes back from spending 2 hours reading some interesting Polycount threads on Tree generation to finally hit 'Post Reply' ***

Damn you Polycount and your succulant modeling goodness!

[Friar]

What 2da file did you plop a line on for this? I don't see a skydome.2da

[popcorn_eater]

Whoa, man. This looks awesome!

[Hellfire_RWS]

koundog1 wrote...

What 2da file did you plop a line on for this? I don't see a skydome.2da

No 2da editing needed