Leaderboard

https://deadlystream.com/topic/5632-black-line-in-middle-of-face/?do=findComment&comment=59000 The short answer is that it should limit how far in pixels the texture can wrap.

Playing around with the new UV maps. Seeing how different colors respond under ambient light and seeing if I lined everything up correctly.

This turned out better than I expected: The video shows a test for an animated Malachor skybox and surprisingly it actually looks good. What you see are basically three layers: A skybox that has only terrain. A second skybox that shows the closest clouds including the "ceiling" and rotates around its axis. And a cylinder that has the distant clouds and rotates slower than the close clouds. And the video also shows my new lightning animation. The skybox is still not done though. I want to have more cloud contrast (all attempts for that were unsuccessful so far) which should also help with distinguishing the two cloud layers, the terrain color is not quite right and it needs to be lowered a bit as well. And then there are the lightning strikes coming directly from mountains that I need to move somewhere else. Oh and there's a rendering error where part of the terrain is cut off for some reason. Also not quite sure about the animation speed. I might have to make that faster. I might work on another skybox first though just to get a fresh perspective on Malachor afterwards.

It already did. I had at some point in the distant past even made some clouds for an updated version of Quanons reskin, but I'm not sure if he ever finished that update. In any case, I've been playing around with the Malachor clouds for some weeks now and never got a result that I was really happy with. It wasn't bad but it never looked like a proper storm. But that changed this morning. For this latest version I created a huge cloud vortex and also learned some new stuff that allowed me to have a more interesting cloud underside while having a fully covered sky. Here's what it looked like after a first ingame test: I have since recolored the clouds green and changed some of the twisting in the clouds as well. Now I just want to get a little more contrast, i.e. darker dark parts of the clouds and then the sky might actually be finished. Oh, and I also created a new lightning texture that I wanted to show here but it didn't end up on the screenshot... I'll try to do better next time.

I'm still alive: Not very impressive, I know but at least it's something^^ The models for Malachor are done as is the terrain pretty much. The clouds are still the same placeholders as before but with a different sun position which makes them look even worse. Next up is finishing the sky and then tune the terrain color. But I like where this is going already.

More progress: I was originally going to do Nar Shaddaa next but my idea of getting the buildings from SWTOR proved more complicated than expected/hoped. So instead I worked some more on Dxun. I remade big parts of its landscape, added bushes etc. There's still a lot to do but here's what I have: Then I also started working on Malachor. That one turned out really well so far. The clouds are still very much a placeholder but the terrain is pretty close to being done. The green glow on the ground comes from my attempts of having a low fog that's lit from below. That's partially working but the ground glowing green is an unintended sideeffect that's maybe impossible to get rid of. In that case I'll have to find another solution or just skip the green glow from below *insert spooky music here*

There's nothing fancy about it. I just copied the mesh from another module (Upper City South), positioned it in my Davik's Estate scene in 3ds Max and linked it to the skybox odysseybase. And since I'm lazy, I took a building mesh that already has a proper lightmap so I didn't have to add that one either. In other news: I now consider the skybox part of Taris final. I will probably go back and tweak the lightmaps some more in the future but that will be only tiny changes. And to celebrate this milestone there is the obligatory render: I also went back to the very first skybox I made when restarting this project almost two years ago: The Telos Polar Plateau. There was always something bothering me about its snow in particular, but that's now fixed. The trick was to get rid of the fancy snow shader (which had among other effects an actual displacement for piled up snow) and replace it with a very simple color shader instead. Then I lightened up the rock color to better match the ingame terrain and the skybox was done. Afterwards I just had to fix up the model and while doing that, I also added a skybox to the academy hangar similar to DarthParametrics standalone mod. And even though it's not exactly spectacular, here's a standalone render of that skybox:

Added:

You are absolutely right about that. The colours were still a bit off and Bioware's lighting on Taris is terrible^^ So I continued iterating over the lightmap for my 2d buildings and also the lightmaps for the 3d buildings to get everything to blend together. Once I was happy with that, I enabled all the clouds in TG and rendered the skybox again. That changed the lighting of the skybox so there was a mismatch once again. That meant tweaking the skybox lighting to get it closer to where it was before, followed by tweaking the lightmaps again. And finally, I rerendered the 2d buildings with more contrast and a better cubemap. Here's the result of all that: Much better if you ask me. What's left now is to rerender the cubemap (used both when rendering the backdrop buildings and ingame for reflections) at a higher resolution and then maybe do some additional tweaking. More importantly, I still need to do the same thing (changing all the lightmaps) for the Upper City South. But I'm getting there I also noticed that I had forgotten about one skybox when going through all the models and fixing them: Davik's Estate. That was changed and Davik has a nice view from his hangar now. I decided not to add additional backdrop buildings here since I figured that his estate was probably expensive and should thus stand a little more separated from the rest of the buildings.

I'm still here. And after moving, handing in a thesis and working a lot I finally had some time to work on skyboxes again. Yeay I also just realised today that I can use a simple cylindricalk UVW map for lightmaps and don't have to use a multi-unwrap script followed by somehow projecting a cylindrical map and rendering that to a texture. With that roadblock out of the way I was able to get a lot of work done for Taris. The backdrop buildings are now lightmapped to blend with the skybox: For comparison. Here's the same without lightmaps: In that case one would of course change the color for the texture but you can also see the change in "lighting" in the lightmapped image from left to right. That would have been impossible with a single backdrop building texture and no lightmaps. Now I just need to figure out what those weird white rectangles floating around the upper city are and get rid of them. I might also tweak the lightmap some more, especially for the Upper City South. And I need to check if everything still looks good once I render the skybox with all clouds enabled. Apart from the lightmaps I also did something else today. I'll show it in a screenshot and for some reason I'm feeling like making a guessing game out of it. Please don't ask me why. I'll post some hints in spoiler tags below and if you don't feel like guessing, you can just open the answer-spoiler^^ Answer: That's it for now, so all that's left for this post is me wishing you all a MERRY CHRISTMAS!

Just to be clear, are we talking about this one? I'm not making any promises yet, but I've been learning how to model lightsabers and might be up for it.

Bad Carth, those are garbage UVs. Blue = good, green = slow down, yellow = stop, orange = GO BACK, purple = dead.