The sky's my limit?

[ekimmai]

I'm having a few problems with adding a decent-looking sky to my age, having left this until after the majority of landscaping was complete - thought this would be an easy bit as I have managed to add a simple sky (to a basic age) before using vertex-paint.

So far I have tried the following: I followed one of the wiki guides and created a UVsphere, reduced this to about 55% (i.e. hemisphere plus a bit of a hang-down over the sides), ensured normals facing inwards, added a material to the mesh. I found some great landscape pictures of skies so thought I'd try to load one as an image-texture: using UV mapping seemed to produce strange affects (in the preview) and the wiki guide did not mention using UV so I just applied the image to the mesh surface as a whole (which looked like it had worked okay) - but I got errors when trying to export with PYPRP. Something about material and UV......
Should I be unwrapping the surface and using UV mapping after all? What is this Sphere projection option under unwrapping? Do I need to go one step further and consider a sky-box of some sort? (Hope not as this seems more complex and requires various images I don't have).

I would really appreciate hearing how other people have created their skies and any help that can be offered me!
(love the planet-sky in Camp Bravo!)
(I would paste the exact export errors I get, only I use a different computer for blender/uru and so don't have access at this moment).

Thanks
Ekimmai

[boblishman]

the wiki has a great tutorial .... http://www.guildofwriters.com/wiki/Adding_Atmosphere

(make sure you keep the number of polygons on the sphere down to a minimum ... it doesn't need to be very complex)

[ekimmai]

COOL! That's just the sort of thing I was looking for. Thankyou!

[ekimmai]

Okay I have managed to follow most of the tutorial but with 3 questions/hiccups:

1. I can only seem to view part of the sphere at any one time due to the middle section being invisible. Is this normal? Makes selecting rings of vertices difficult.

skydome.jpg (175.7 KiB) Viewed 2550 times

2. Tutorial suggests UV mapping from top view initially but this gives strange results. Best I can do is map from side view so I am guessing this is the correct approach.

3. I have selected NOMIST but don't I need SHADELESS as well?

Any ideas on these?
E

[Jojon]

1. This is because there are near- and far "clipping borders" -- only stuff between these are rendered in the 3D view. Since your dome is so large, it extends beyond the far one. To increase clipping distance, open the "View properties" window from the view's "View" menu and drag "Clip end" as high as it will go.

2. There is a "UV calculation" panel among the "Editing" buttons -- there you can choose whether sphere/cylinder unwrapping should be from top or side view, just pick what works for you. Unwrapping will be around the object centre, so make sure it really is centered within the dome. (You could loop-select the equator [holding down Alt while selecting a vertex does this instantly, apparently, alternating horizontal-/vertical loop ], press "shift-S" and from the menu that pops up, place the cursor at selection, then ObjectMode->Transform->CenterCursor.
You will probably still need to adjust the UVs afterwards - remember that you can box-select in the UV/image editor, just as you could in the 3D view and that here too, scaling and moving can be axis-restricted by pressing X or Y.

3. Yes, go with shadeless - your's pretends better to be a real sky than Kadish's efforts. :9

[ekimmai]

Thanks Jojon for lots of great tips.
...and what a difference it makes when you can see what you are doing!

E