Creating a Horizon

[thecentaur]

Hi :)

There are about 3 parts to this as far as I know. I'll post the latter two later.

Basically, what you want to achieve is the kind of horizon effect that you see in some games (aka spherical) rather than a boxy horizon. I'll show you as best as I can to achieve that effect.

PART I
Constructing the Horizon

First, you want to start out with a sphere:
http://i242.photobucket.com/albums/ff113/alone24/Meta1.jpg

You can just go to primitives and create a new sphere.


Next, you want to cut about this much from the sphere:
http://i242.photobucket.com/albums/ff113/alone24/Meta4.jpg


Which should turn into this:
http://i242.photobucket.com/albums/ff113/alone24/Meta2.jpg

Adjust the size of your hemisphere (this is subjective.... I usually make it sort of flat)


And now invert face:
http://i242.photobucket.com/albums/ff113/alone24/Meta3.jpg

This is to make sure that the textures are from where Lara can see.


PART II
Setting up the Textures

**I would recommend using textures that are in a 2:1 ratio. This is important, I'll explain it soon.

http://lfgrafix.com/grafix/C3DB-Skies/Skies_Free/SkyBasic-1.html

http://www.cgtextures.com/
(scroll down to "Skies 360")

Next, resize the ENTIRE canvas to your liking (I prefer 256x128 canvas)

For this example, I'm using this texture:
http://lfgrafix.com/grafix/C3DB-Skies/Skies_Free/SkyBasic-1.html
scroll down to Sky-111604c

Here it is on the canvas:
http://i242.photobucket.com/albums/ff113/alone24/PS1.jpg
Awesome, right? =P


Now resize it to whatever you want (but here are my preferences):
http://i242.photobucket.com/albums/ff113/alone24/PS2.jpg


Once it's resized, select the selecting tool and here are the preferences I used:
http://i242.photobucket.com/albums/ff113/alone24/PS3.jpg


With that, you'll get perfect chunks of selected pieces..:
http://i242.photobucket.com/albums/ff113/alone24/PS4.jpg


Crop each section and save it; these are the individual horizon pieces. Now you'll see why I chose to crop each piece into 64x64, the maximum size of strpix textures is 256x256 and 64 X 4 = 256 so each sky texture will line up perfectly in strpix

Do that until you get something like this in a folder.... keep in mind i just copied each piece into IrfanView therefore all their names are clipboard.. lol:
http://i242.photobucket.com/albums/ff113/alone24/PS5.jpg

=D

**Part Three Coming Soon**