My First Photorealistic Custom Skybox

A refuge for those migrating from the fallen DXEditing.com and a place for general discussion relating to Deus Ex editing (coding, mapping, etc).
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ikaricrime
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My First Photorealistic Custom Skybox

Post by ikaricrime »

Image

http://www.moddb.com/downloads/industrial-royal

This is something I always wanted to do and that is take a photo of some night sky line and put it in a map.

This really changed the way I mapped and there a reason why I believe that this improves my mapping ability alot, despite having alot of mapping skills which I've learnt from the past.

Deus Ex unique selling point was that it was based on real world locations which happened in the future. This allowed the player to put themselves into the world of the future. It really did feel like it was worth while and was worth thinking about.

After making this custom made skybox, it make me rethink why the SDK exists. At the time of the SDK release, NO ONE or NO PLAYER, MODDER or whatever had no free means of getting the right camera to take really clear night shots like the New York level in Deus Ex.

and this what make the same sell. if anyone played the Demo like I did at the time, the New York skyline allowed players to feel like they were there

Even PlanetDeusEx uses this has a selling point, that skyline was really rare at the time and is used on the website border.

Even after playing the nameless mod, there no customer skyline, expect the fuzzy one in forum city. I mean it's makes sense that Forum City does have a fuzzy skyline, because that matter is really like that, the same matter that in our TVs. It was really good there!

Anyways, who here cares to agree? I don't know if I'll be making more and polishing and etc, maybe make my own mod in a Deus Ex style fashion. That's something I want to work on. I do believe the skybox is one of the problems with Mapping in Deus Ex because no one has the time, effort and technology to make another custom skyline.

Another clue, Tack Lab. I like Tack however how he describes making Skyboxes, it's another clue that us mappers have trouble, making a similar look Skybox

Link: http://www.offtopicproductions.com/tack ... yZone.html
Add a Sky Zone (the easy way)

Overview:
The easiest way to add a good-looking sky zone to your map is to simply steal one from one of the Deus Ex maps.
The hard way doesn't really explain it. It's friendly I must admit and I admit someone who gets into it can do the job, which is what I want to prove. I really do want to make original content when modding for Deus Ex. Which is why I'm getting this out of the way!

Which is why I would say, this is one of the biggest challenges of Deus Ex Modding and it would mean getting people who have those high end camera phones that can make really nice night shots. That wasn't even the beginning of the troubles I had making that skybox, despite the map taking 2 days to make. It was all the basic mapping skills that saved me all that time, that's why I released it despite being unpolished or whatever.

Here's the map link again, feel free to download, rate and comment:
http://www.moddb.com/downloads/industrial-royal
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AdamJensen
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Re: My First Photorealistic Custom Skybox

Post by AdamJensen »

Mate, that looks awesome.

I am downloading it now!

You are ought to check out this map:
http://www.deusexonline.com/dxmp-arabia ... -t108.html
ggrotz
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Re: My First Photorealistic Custom Skybox

Post by ggrotz »

I was wondering this very thing while I was in a bathroom somewhere looking at the tiles on the wall, which coincidentally reminded me of one of the DX textures. I looked around the rest of the building when I walked and found two more related ones. Not to belittle New Vision and the fabulous work DaveW put into it, but I wondered how easy it would be to come up with a "Photo Vision" project and just fill out the main textures by taking pictures of real bricks, wall tiles, and so on (being careful to not get flash glare or editing it out in the final pic) and then framing the output up and making textures out of it. More especially, if you finished it out, what it would look like within the game.
DDL
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Re: My First Photorealistic Custom Skybox

Post by DDL »

Tiling is the big problem. Not so bad for, well..actual tiles, but for something less symmetric like brickwork it gets increasingly difficult to make it tile convincingly.

As for the OP, I don't think DX's unique selling point was "it features real-world locations" so much as "you're a nano-augmented superspy and you have almost complete operational freedom". Plus the limitation on skyboxes wasn't cameras (we've been taking wonderfully high-definition skyline photos for years) it was texture resolution. The renderer the DX engine used at the time physically couldn't render textures bigger than 256x256. No matter how nice your source image is, it's going to look like crap after you've resized it down to that. And these are 8-bit indexed images to boot, so 256x256 and only 256 colours.

Not a lot of potential, really. Hence the low-def, distant New York skyline on liberty island, and the low def semi-distant skyline in battery park.

Plus the way skyboxes work inherently limits what you can do: it's very difficult to make an "inner city" skybox (i.e. one where you're surrounded by buildings) without it becoming very obvious that it's a skybox, especially if your leve has any Z-axis action.

And of course, it almost always needs to be night, since that way you can use darkness to obscure that fact that it's a box (even on some of the original DX maps you can see the corners: vandenburg is good for this).
A daytime map WITH clouds is almost impossible to do convincingly.

Basically, like Tack says: skyboxes are hard. And it's not really because of a lack of good source images.


EDIT: holy crap, you actually used a ton of stitched 256x256 images? Dude, we have better renderers, now! Chris Dohnal's stuff here: http://www.cwdohnal.com/utglr/

These'll let you happily use textures up to uh, about 2048x2048 or so. I think.
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FastGamerr
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Re: My First Photorealistic Custom Skybox

Post by FastGamerr »

Up to (at least) 4096x4096 with the DX10 renderer. Such DDS textures do take up a lot of space, though.
DDL
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Re: My First Photorealistic Custom Skybox

Post by DDL »

Also, having said all that, I should point out your map is very nice.
Cybernetic pig
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Re: My First Photorealistic Custom Skybox

Post by Cybernetic pig »

What happened to this guy. This is pretty good.
I wonder if he'd object if I "borrowed" it >:D

In all seriousness I want more Skyboxes from this dude. walk up close to the fake backdrop and it still looks pretty good. From a few meters back and beyond it looks fantastic.
Zireael
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Re: My First Photorealistic Custom Skybox

Post by Zireael »

This looks amazing!
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