GOOF Sky

A place to show off your latest screenshots and for people to comment on them. Only start a new thread here if you have some nice images to show off!
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Falagard
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GOOF Sky

Post by Falagard »

I've been working for a few days on skies for my game engine, GOOF.

Screenshot and Video below:

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http://www.larabie.net/ogre/AnimatedSky4.wmv

The idea I had was to render a series of skyboxes for a 24 hour period from Bryce 5.5 and then blend between them in Ogre.

Took some playing around in Bryce with sun Azimuths and Altitudes, colours, clouds and stars, but I've finally got something that looks decent. Still needs some work but it's going to be a game system plugin in GOOF for environmental effects. Eventually there'll be a directional light that matches the sun direction from the skybox, light colour that matches the skybox, and fog, and interpolates as the skyboxes change.

You can see the blending between skyboxes since it's moving so fast, but obviously in the game it will be moving much slower and the transitions won't be apparent. The key thing is that the player sees a beautiful sky any time they look at it, and the changes aren't jarringly apparent.

It will also be possible to move from clear to cloudy, cloudy to stormy, etc. because the skyboxes run a 24 hour period and just have to be rendered out for each type of sky, then based on the current time it'll be possible to blend laterally to a new set of skyboxes.

I also need to background load the skybox textures and only switch once loaded to minimize the frame stuttering. It isn't apparent here because I've already moved through the skyboxes one complete cycle before capturing the video so the textures have already been loaded from disk once and the second load is fast.
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Post by Jerky »

Wow, very freaking sweet. You da man!
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Post by Falagard »

Thanks :-)

I think it turned out well, I wasn't sure if it was even possible until I tried it out.
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Post by Jerky »

The more you do, the more I feel you should be a member of PW ;), just for the sake of you doing more work for us than we have done for ourselves.
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Post by Falagard »

:-)

I actually like the fact that PW will be using GOOF (I assume) since it means that a) I can get feedback on engine features b) I might be able to get extra programming support from your programmers, and c) it's cool.
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Post by Jerky »

Count on it.
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Post by raicuandi »

Hey, that's quite cool!
Nice work!
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Post by batonrye »

The transitions from nigtht -> morning -> day are very nice.

Well done!
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Post by ahmedali »

Great! I got this idea too some time ago. Im worried about the texture memory it gonna require for NxM dimensional case. Like a 24 sky boxes for every wheather condition stormy, clear, casted etc. But I think it can be compensated.

I hope Kechno is also working on Cealum2.
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Post by Chris Jones »

sweet! :P

good work
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Post by Lee04 »

Nice work !

Really nice. Should go into Ogre demo as well I think.

How many images what sizes and resulotions, depth, memory, is it on a sky cube or ...


I was thinking can I pait my own sky that is ching say in photoshop or is it just to many images to paint?

We like to have artistic control and this would be really nice if it could blend hand painted sky changes as well.

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Post by joi »

Yeah man, pretty darn good. A little more playing and you will get there. Ever played Oblivion ? Im so amazed by their wheater and day/night cycle, you are almost there. :)
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Post by Kencho »

Looking great, very good work! I was planning a similar method, but only focused to dynamic cloud layers animation instead of a whole skybox ;)
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Post by Falagard »

I don't think the transitions could be done by hand because of the number of transitions and the difficulty of painting clouds at the proper perspective, but perhaps if you had really good artists...

It is a skybox, so 5 views plus the "down" view that I don't use because you should never be able to see below the horizon (in my case). Each hour has a set of textures, so 24 x 5 = 120 textures at 512 resolution for this sky. Each additional sky type, stormy for example, would be another 120 images. This isn't much of a problem in my case, I'm quite happy to have three sky types (clear, cloudy, stormy) for a total of 360 images, since the skies are generated quickly in Bryce. Disk space isn't bad, currently they're jpg and 120 images clock in around 3 mbs.

At any one time 10 textures at 512 resolution are loaded in memory. I'll probably attempt DXT compression to see if the compression artifacts are tolerable to reduce memory consumption, and also have lower res textures for low spec machines.

I own Oblivion, very nice skies. The resolution of the textures on the sky blows me away - particularly the stars at night. There's a time lapse video kicking around that shows their skies through a diurnal cycle and it looks great.
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Post by Falagard »

I actually have a plan to go out and take photos of a real sky over a period of time and see if I can get it to work. My problem is that I'm not sure how to stitch the images together properly. If I have a standard digital camera, I'm not sure how to figure out the field of view and get it to look right. Example, in Bryce I set up the FOV to be 90 degrees for each direction, and that works perfectly on a skybox. But regular camera FOV is different.

I've seen panorama software that stitches together different photos into a panorama - in fact my camera supports a special mode for helping to create panoramas, but I'm still not sure how I'd get it to work :-)

Perhaps if I took a horizontal 360 degree panorama and then used the software to stitch it... then increased my pitch angle so I'm looking up more and did it again... gawd I just don't know :-)
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Post by scroogie »

Autostitch from the university of columbia is really cool:
http://www.cs.ubc.ca/~mbrown/autostitch/autostitch.html
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Post by jacmoe »

This looks fabulous! :D

Looking forward to GOOF!
In fact, the Conglomerate Project is going to be based on it.
I hate reinvent any wheels, and GOOF looks like a perfect foundation. :)
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Post by Liquidream »

That's really cool. Like alot of these guys, I was thinking of something similar for my project. It's good to know it can be done! :D

I think I'd still like to do it with dynamic clouds though... hmmm... I'm thinking perhaps:
  • 1) A single "gradient" skybox which gets it's colour/brightness modified gradually with time, avoiding multiple skyboxes (feasible??)
    2) A cloud layer that moves real-time
    3) A "sun" billboard, perhaps with lens-flare
I am of-course miles away from this, but I think it'd be cool! :wink:
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Post by Praetor »

Yeah this method depends on no dynamic clouds. Meaning if you played the same sequence over and over the cloud patterns would be the same over and over. Dynamic clouds are while research project of their own. Like shadows, this is still a problem without a definitive solution.
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Post by Falagard »

Meaning if you played the same sequence over and over the cloud patterns would be the same over and over.
Not if you're switching between sky types, such as clear, cloudy, stormy throughout the day. Besides, no one sits there for 8 hours and watches a sky for re-emerging patterns ;-)

Also it'd be easy to add a very translucent scrolling sky plane with a cloud later to add variety, although I personally don't see the need for it.

YannL, a programmer who once frequented the gamedev forums and seems to be a guru, spent 8 months working on his sky system with dynamic clouds, god rays, and crazy stuff like that, and I spent 2 days (well, a couple hours a day for 5 days). I'd rather not spend 8 months, so I'll take my version instead ;-)
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Post by Praetor »

Certainly a simplified solution works for most games. He just asked about dynamic clouds, so that's the answer.
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Post by Chris Jones »

Besides, no one sits there for 8 hours and watches a sky for re-emerging patterns
hehe, theres got to be at least someone, somewhere that has done that (not me though) :P
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Post by jacmoe »

Falagard wrote:no one sits there for 8 hours and watches a sky for re-emerging patterns ;-)
It depends! :P
I haven't got Oblivion yet, but I played Morrowind a lot... ! :)
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I still think it should go into Ogre and its skybox demo.

Post by Lee04 »

I think to get the perpective right you can use Bryce and then hand paint the images on top of the Brucy images but you still need to be happy with the number of clouds and placements speeds that Bruce gives you but the look could be changed enormously from thr one Brucy has if you would like to. I think it's a great feature you have there. I still think it should go into Ogre and the Ogre skybox demo or something.
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Post by Imperil »

Kencho wrote:Looking great, very good work! I was planning a similar method, but only focused to dynamic cloud layers animation instead of a whole skybox ;)
You can see that in action here, check out http://risbrandt.blogspot.com/ if you want to see some dynamic clouds/sky with atmospheric scattering. Jonas rocks he built it up within about 2 weeks :) I absolutely love his atmospheric scattering implementation and how it affects objects (ie terrain). Although keep in mind that compared to what Falagard is doing it likes to hog cycles.