Me and my big mouth!.....

[andylegate]

So you want to make your skies like Noloben, eh???

Oops! I may have bitten off more than I can chew with that goal. Then again, if I can achieve it, I can share how I did it, so that others too can do this, or variations of it.

The day after MOUL closed, I loaded up Myst V and was in Noloben. I studied the sky and really wanted to put that kind of atmosphere into Zephyr Cove. How hard can it be? Just some blue sky and clouds, right?

Well, not exactly.......

First the clouds are moving.....

Well okay, not really a problem thanks to our Handy Dandy Tool Devs! We have animated textures now. The clouds in Noloben simply rotate around the sky dome. I can do the same thing.

And I did, not with the texture I really want to use, but simply to put something there and get it going. I used the Xofs and ended up having to go to frame 15,000 to make the sky rotate as slowly as in Noloben. There! No problem!

Ooops. Wait! Go back and look. In Noloben, there are two layers of clouds. One big hawking one straight up! And then the others. They move at different speeds.

Hmmm....well again no problem, one way to do it would be to duplicate the top portion of the sky dome mesh, and drop it ever so slightly down, and map the other cloud texture to it, then animate it also....

Okay......but then there is the sun in Noloben.....bright looking yellow thing. Well, we all now it's not really a light. Simply textures to give us that illusion.
But if you look you'll notice that half the Noloben sky dome (the half with the "sun" ) starts with an ever so slight yellow light gradient and gets more yellow and bright as you get towards the sun that looks like it's setting (or rising, use what ever you desire here).

Okay, well maybe they have that part of the sky dome either duplicated the mesh and gave it a alpha texture that blends like that. It's moved ever so slightly in ward so that the "cloud sky" texture on the whole dome looks like the clouds are turning more and more yellow and brighter as that texture moves behind what I'll now call a "Sun Filter"

More than willing to give this a try, see what works, what doesn't........except I have a problem.

I CAN'T FIND A FREAKIN' SKY TEXTURE THAT'LL WORK!!!

Okay, okay, calm down....just make one........

hehehehehe.......hahahahahaha.......MWAHAHAHAHAHAHA! I don't do textures.....at least not very well.

I'm really not an artist....as far as drawing is concerned. I do draw comic strip characters (you may have noticed my Bear Theo and me with the Drizzle Tut I made over at the Wiki). But I don't draw anything else really well.

Hey no problem, use a program like MapZone to make it!

Except the learning curve for MapZone is about as hard (if not harder) than Blender was.......

Sooooooooo.......I asked my team for some sky clouds like Noloben, buuuut, there's been no takers......I heard crickets instead.

So I'm more than likely going to scrap this project. For now at least. I'll put in a different sky texture and make it slowly move like I've got, but I'm going to make the time earlier in the day, like late morning or Afternoon. I can put in a really, really good sun glare and fake sun for that and make that work.

Some day though, I'll learn how to use something like MapZone or go to art school or something, then hopefully I can come back to this.
In the mean time though, I have to go out and mow the lawn...........humph......time to get a goat me thinks!

[Marcello]

Ok... caught me ....

Can you mail me your age in it's current state and a sketch of the kinda texture you want? I'll give it a try.

[Aloys]

About the yellow to blue gradient: If I remember correctly (but my memory is fuzzy), I had managed to import Noloben at a time when PyPRP handled the EoA Ages, and the dome actually had a nice *vertex painted* gradient. going from full blue to slightly yellow; and the clouds texture themselves are pretty much black and white. (leaving all the color work to the vertex colors..). Which is a simple and clever way to handle that..
But doing really clean vertex painted gradients isn't exactly easy in Blender..
A very translucent texture could work too but there's a risk that it gives a washed out result..

[Jojon]

But doing really clean vertex painted gradients isn't exactly easy in Blender..

You haven't tried the VCol gradient script? (...which should be installed with the standard Blender distro) :7
Paint two vertices with your start- and end colours, then run the script, which asks you to point them (the vertices) out - viola!

Most of what Andy tries to do, should be perfectly possible with a single mesh, with a single, multi-layered material, but I shouldn't say too much, since I'm struggling to get two layers of moving waves to show up, myself... :7

[Nadnerb]

For those who don't know, the VCol Gradient script is found in the Paint menu while in Vertex Paint mode. You can only find the Paint menu menu in the 3D view while in Vertex Paint mode.

[D'eux]

Sadly, the sky effects in Noloben just won't be possible just yet with the PyPRP plugin as it stands. The animation is fine, but the way the layers blend together requires a colour blending mode that Blender (and probably the plugin) don't provide - akin to 'Hard Light' in Photoshop. Also, regarding layering, I don't believe transparency is properly supported for animated textures.

Strangely, I can get very close to the affect, but only if I look at my LCD monitor from an extremely oblique angle while running a particular sky setup I have no idea what the scientific explanation for that would be though.

-: D'eux :-

[andylegate]

Awwwwww......

But I thought we were known to do the impossible!

Actually I gave this a try last night. I tried adding different layers to the sky itself, but as D'eux pointed out, it doesn't work with the animated textures.
Well, no problem, just add a mesh is all.

But no mater how I tried it, it kept looking like a giant piece of fly paper! I got it to look GOOD in the center, but the edges were very visable no matter what I tried.

I'm not feeling too bad as it's not me this time, but a limited capability right now. That's okay, I'll try setting a different mood in Zephyr then. If we get something like this working down the road, I can always do a different Age with it. Besides, without the water like in Noloben, I don't think it would have looked right anyway.

[Aloys]

But doing really clean vertex painted gradients isn't exactly easy in Blender..

You haven't tried the VCol gradient script? (...which should be installed with the standard Blender distro) :7

Ho! Thanks for pointing that out, very usefull!! That should make some of my work much easier.. I do'nt know why I never clicked that menu entry before..

Sadly, the sky effects in Noloben just won't be possible just yet with the PyPRP plugin as it stands. The animation is fine, but the way the layers blend together requires a colour blending mode that Blender (and probably the plugin) don't provide - akin to 'Hard Light' in Photoshop

I see what you mean. I haven't tried it yet, but I think by using a very light color saturation for the vertices and high contrast textures it should work.. I'll give this a try and see if I can get some decent results.

[D'eux]

Please have a go Aloys... I tried like a zillion combinations and got close, but not quite there. It sounds like Andy did too. So if you find you're getting somewhere near, it might be good if we can work together to see if we can crack it with the plugin as it stands. I don't think it's possible, but as Andy says... we strive to do the impossible

-: D'eux :-

[Marcello]

Isn't this an example of in game shaders? Just like the water? I have done some reading on shaders at Nvidia's site and they can do these kinda blown out things too. Some popular FPS have almost the entiry blow out the hightlights. It can be very nice looking and I thing Cyan used it on the sky here.