Hi guys,
What's your recommendations? Should I use sky box or sky sphere?
If I used sky sphere, should I apply cube texture to the sphere or just a single texture?
What is more commonly used especially in FPS games? Which one can produce better sky and which is easier for producing different looking skies?
Personally, I prefer the sky box solution. Less triangles, less complexity, and you can have a cube map that you can use for reflections too.
To a certain extent though, it doesn't much matter, and I would let my artist's opinion or the availability of convenient cheap online assets sway my decision.
I made our team go with a sky dome ( cut the bottom part off and make it a solid color ). There are three domes:
1) The outer most layer, This has our color tones associated with it and defines the sky color. We can use code to make the gradient applied as well as control how far up and down it goes.
2) The second inner one rotates and has a cloud texture applied
3) Is the inner most one and rotates faster than the #2 slot. A texture cloud is applied here as well thus creating a parallax effect to the sky.
Lastly, at night we apply a stars texture to the #1 slot... although this is a bit hard to do if your texture guy does not know how to make textures for domes/circles.
What is most used commonly in modern FPS games?
Can I use cube map on skysphere?
Some sky textures looks very good on the texture but when I try to apply it to the sky sphere it doesn't look as good as it was, that's why I'm thinking that I could use cube map.
@riuthamus: How large are your skydomes? Wouldn't that give the appearance of the clouds curving too steeply towards the earth? In your screenshot, it almost looks like the clouds are rising up perpendicular to the ground.
When and how do you apply the sun? Between the 1st and 2nd domes?
How high resolution do you make your domes?
[/curiosity]
Do you even need a skybox with atmospheric scattering?
yes, if you want to control the color. We originally had the scattering effect and it was damn near impossible to fully control the color
How large are your skydomes? Wouldn't that give the appearance of the clouds curving too steeply towards the earth? In your screenshot, it almost looks like the clouds are rising up perpendicular to the ground.
1) Pretty large
2) It can if you make it go all the way to the top, but it doesnt, i can show you a picture if that helps
3) Some clouds do this, or give the same effect
When and how do you apply the sun? Between the 1st and 2nd domes?
1) Sun is applied to the furthest dome there is, the back dome and is applied on top of the color
2) Right now the dome textures are 4096x672
