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More on skyboxes

Posted: Wed Oct 12, 2005 8:57 pm
by Rixeh
Hey all, I've been fighting with skyboxes for the past few days, and I think I just hit a wall. ;) Ive got no problem actually making them -- they look awesome in photoshop. But once I load up Ogre with the same skyboxes, the resolution drops to "pretty bad". ;)

Say there's a starfield. Each star is just 1 pixel in size... in photoshop. But in Ogre, the stars look quite a bit bigger and the resolution is fairly low. Is there some way I can get around this? I did notice if I made 1024x1024 maps, Ogre scales the images to fit (looks like 512x512) which helps quality a bit. But we can't be using 2048 maps x 6 sides, y'know?

Any tips on making skyboxes a higher res?

Posted: Wed Oct 12, 2005 10:43 pm
by Marcel_S
Hi!

can you post a screenshot please?
maybe the mipmaps are working wrong... hey I am just an artist ;)

Posted: Wed Oct 12, 2005 10:45 pm
by Rixeh
LOL well so am I... I dont know if there's something that has to change in the code or not, it isn't my area. ;) Screenshots are coming


*edit* ok here we go. This is one side of the skybox in photoshop...
Image

and this is how it looks in-game:
Image

See how everything looks low-res? Is there a way to fix that? I'm using DDS files for the actual skybox images, maybe I forgot a setting somewhere.

Posted: Thu Oct 13, 2005 12:01 am
by Chris Jones
you sure its not just stretch along way? rather than being low res?

btw i dont really know much about skyboxes or how they work, is just a guess

Posted: Thu Oct 13, 2005 11:32 am
by Falk
We used a skydome and made our star texture tileable. After increasing the iteration of the texture (via code) it looked quite good ...

Here are some screenshots ...

Posted: Fri Oct 14, 2005 6:28 am
by urthen
@Falk: I dont think this is what hes looking for, judging by his texture I think this isnt tileable.

I have a question about the texture too. It looks to me like the picture is stretched around the edges. Is this to compensate for the fact it is a sky BOX and you want it to look correctly round? If so... hrmm... I may need to consider this.

Posted: Fri Oct 14, 2005 8:37 am
by Rixeh
Oh it tiles, that's just the "up" image of the skybox.. ;) One of our other artists is messing around with using 2048x2048 maps :shock: just so we can get the quality we're looking for. Insanity!

Posted: Fri Oct 14, 2005 9:14 am
by :wumpus:
Can you post the log of Ogre loading these images? It normally only scales textures if they are of non power-of-two resolutions, so 2048x2048 should work perfectly fine. Do realise that 2048x2048 textures take 16Mb of memory uncompressed, so be sure to use DXT1 if quality allows (takes it it down to 2Mb)

Posted: Fri Oct 14, 2005 6:27 pm
by biteme
There 256 colour indexed 2048 textures so there only 4 megs uncompressed. 2 megs dxt1 compressed at the highest quality

Posted: Sat Oct 15, 2005 6:17 pm
by Rixeh
Just an update for those interested in getting high-res skyboxes, we're working around this by using 2048x2048 maps, x6 sides of the cube. They're Indexed color wherever possible, and compressed to DDS format. :)

*edit* dammit, biteme got it in before I did 8)