Hey. I was wondering how I could make a sky like the following pic from Halo and use it in Jedi Academy. Any suggestions?



http://halo.ogresnet.com/screenshots/albums/Gameshots/Sky.sized.jpeg)

www.skypaint.com)

Bleeeeeeech, that program looks abominable. If you want to make a decent landscape sky, try using TerraGen (http://www.map-review.com/index.php?page=tutorial_view&id=2).

I assume the real question you're asking is how to get the "halo" ring structure in the skybox. TerraGen can't quite do that, so you have two options. One, get ahold of a 3D image-rendering program like Bryce (notice how all the skypaint demo images were first created in Bryce 2--the current version is Bryce 5--and then merely touched up in skypaint). However, an even easier thing to do is to create whatever sort of sky you want in TerraGen or from the default game skyboxes, and then make a portal sky (http://www.map-review.com/index.php?page=tutorial_view&id=15) that includes the giant ring.

So I should buil din the ring and then pain ta sky in the background? What about the subtle blue sky to outer space feel?

That's where editing the skybox images comes in--one quick-and-dirty way to do it is to copy the default "Stars" skybox, and add a blue-to-transparent gradient on top of the left, right, front, and back images in PhotoShop. The more involved way is to actually render the sky yourself in TerraGen, and add the stars later (here's an example of rendering a sky and adding a star image on top: Mirromount Dusk (http://wso.williams.edu:8000/~jshoer/images/cg/mirrormount%20dusk.jpg)).

On the other hand, you could probably also do it with elements in the portal sky. You see where the circular gradient marked "scene" is in the illustration to this tutorial (http://www.map-review.com/index.php?page=tutorial_view&id=15)?) That's a placeholder, but if you take that exactly and use a blue gradient, on top of the starry skybox, you might get what you're after.

Alright I think I've got the hang of Terragen. So for the skybox are you saying that in my scene (the little black ring) I should just add a huge circular brush that resembles the ring? How would I do that?

Just cuild it the same way you build any part of a map. Probably what you want to do is make a huge cylinder or endcap, invert the matrix, and then maybe bend the edges around a bit to give the impression of depth.

Experiment a little. Anything you put in that box will "become" part of the sky, viewed from the position of the sky-portal entity. I used this trick in Gulf of Souls to create the impression of some towering cliffs rising way above the playable area, you want to do the same thing, only with a giant ring.