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Voiceover: Hey, thanks for watching 3dmotive.com.
My name is Tyler and in this video
we're going to be creating a skydome for use in an environment.
This video is intended for beginner or intermediate levels.
Assumes that you're pretty comfortable doing basic modeling inside of 3ds Max
and manipulating textures in Photoshop.
Now as you can see here,
this is kind of the final effect of what we'll be doing today.
We're going to be creating a skydome
with the intent to fake some atmosphere, clouds
and even a bit of a horizon line.
Now, you could get a little more in depth
and you could do things like panning clouds.
We could even add some lens flare
say for example, where our sun's at, that sort of thing.
But today we're going to talk about the meat of the subject
which is just creating the skydome that we can start out with.
Now, this actual mesh would probably place the origin of your environment
and scaled it to encompass all of geometry.
If you were standing environment and you look down
you would see this nice sky, this backdrop, etc.
The first thing we need to do,
in Photoshop we need to find a panorama image.
This is a very, very simple image taken of a sky
that is complete 360-degree view.
From edge to edge,
it will wrap and tile perfectly.
This can be taken with a special camera
or what I would recommend is finding one of these online.
Lots of texture sites will have these.
Maybe even Google you could find something.
This particular image I've chosen because it has a sun in it
and as I mentioned before, I'll be using the placement of the sun
to place a lens flare in my environment later on.
It's also, we've got some interesting cloud detail going on,
and some very, very simplistic horizon line stuff.
There's no city, there's no buildings or anything
that might track from what I'm trying to do.
This skydome is very flexible.
First and foremost, we need to take this panorama
and we need to kind of mold it into something
that's going to be much easier to UV map to our sphere.
To start we need to adjust the size.
Go to image, image size.
You can also use alt control I to bring up this dialog.
You'll see I already have constrain of proportions checked off by default.
It's going to let me adjust my width and height independently.
For width we're going to set it to 1024
and for height we'll do the same.
This will give us a nice square image.
You see there's some stretching
and now the sun is now oblong but that's okay.
We're going to fix that right now.
Even the square texture would still be pretty difficult to map to a sphere,
so we're going to use a filter inside of Photoshop
to create a spherical image out of this texture.
We'll go ahead and go to filter, distort
and we'll use polar coordinates.
Polar coordinates use the very center of our image
and map this to an actual sphere.
If we zoom out of our preview here you can see what it's doing.
Go and hit okay.
Now we've got a spherical image
that's super, super easy to map to our skydome.
You could see now our sun is circular again,
our clouds are flowing nicely, all that sort of stuff.
I'm going to go ahead and do save as.
And we'll say this guy is sky underscore COR
and type, I'm going to change to Targa.
Go and hit save.
24 bits is sufficient, hit okay.
We've got a texture ready to map.
Next thing we need to do is actually create our skydome model.
This is pretty straightforward.
Go ahead and open the 3ds Max.
You can see here we're starting at a very, very basic Max file.
We're going to go ahead and choose sphere from the create panel
and we'll go ahead and left-click and drag out a sphere.
I'm going to go ahead and hit J on my keyboard
to get rid of our bounding box.
I'm going to hit G to get rid of the grid
and F for it to turn on edge faces.
All the stuff can kind of be done from here.
Edge face is turned on etc.
Sphere's a good starting point
but we really need a hemisphere for our skydome.
I've got a couple options.
This particular one, let's go ahead and convert this to an editable poly.
I'm going to go ahead and go to face mode
and from the side here I'm just going to roughly select
the bottom half for mesh and we'll go ahead and delete that out.
Now we've got a hemisphere.
It looks pretty gib.
We need to make a couple adjustments before we start UV mapping it.
If we take a look at our final effect here
you can see it's not a perfect dome.
It's actually been kind of squashed down on the Z a little bit.
The idea here is when you're inside of our skydome,
we want the sky to feel like it's panning overhead.
We don't want it to feel so much like it's actually going up into a dome.
We do want some nice curves around the edges
so we're not going to squash it too much.
Let's go ahead and go back to 3ds Max.
By default, the uniform scale is turned on.
Let's go ahead and left click and hold down
and we'll grab non-uniform scale.
This will let us scale independently on all of these axes.
I'm going to go ahead and grab the Z
and we're going to scale it down right around 70 is probably fine.
Just right click on this so we could see how much it's been scaled.
70% is fine.
It gives us kind of that nice squashed look
and make sure our clouds and stuff look correct.
Next we need to do is actually bring in our material
and apply it to our mesh
so we could see what we're doing when we UV map it.
I'm going to go ahead and press M on the keyboard
and that's going to bring up our material window.
Let's go ahead and drag and drop our first material slot unto our skydome.
And next sort of fuse, let's go ahead and pick our bitmap.
Here's the sky color target file we just created in Photoshop.
It's spherized and ready to go.
Go ahead and hit open.
See, we don't quite see it just yet so let's go up the stack
and let's make sure show our map and view port button is on.
All right, go ahead and close the material window
because we no longer need that.
For the most part our model is done.
There are some things that we need to address a little bit later
but the biggest thing right now is the UV mapping.
It's completely off so let's go ahead and fix that.
In our modifier drop down,
let's go ahead and put an unwrap UVW on it.
Now, if we look at our texture again in Photoshop,
you can see it looks as if we've mapped our sphere from the top down.
In Photoshop or in Max rather, let's do just that.
I'm going to go ahead and go to unwrap,
select face mode and control A to select all of our faces
and next we're going to use quick planar.
In order to map directly from the top down,
we're going to set our axis to Z
and we're going to quick planar map.
If I deselect faces and we just take a quick look,
we can see already that our skydome is looking much, much better.
Our sun is in the correct place,
clouds are looking good.
It looks great from the top down.
The issue we'll note though is that from the sides
there's a lot of stretching and distortion.
It should be pretty simple to fix though
and we're going to use the relaxed tool to do that.
With this selected, let's go ahead and scroll back up
and I'll click on edit.
Let me just go ahead and expand our UVW window.
Real quick we can see our UVs,
our edges in particular aren't too easy to see.
On our model, let's go ahead and change our wire frame color to white.
Hit okay.
Now those are much easier to see.
I'm going to go ahead and select face mode again.
All of our faces should be selected,
if not just drag the selection over them.
To fix the stretching again we're going to use the relax tool.
The relax tool all it's really going to be doing is making sure
that these UV faces are roughly the same size and proportion
as the faces in our view port
or in this case vice versa.
Let's go ahead and go to tools, relax
and with this dialog there's a few options that we can really care about.
At the top here, relax by edge angles is important
and we also want to check on keep boundary points fixed.
All we're going to do with that is essentially
just want to ensure that our UV stay inside this blue box here.
We don't want our UVs to tile,
we don't want our sky tile or see any seams.
Keep a look at this area right here
and we'll kind of watch the stretching dissipate over time.
We'll go ahead and click apply once,
and already you can see stretching is starting to go away
and we'll just do this a couple more times.
Just until you're happy.
In this case, I can see a pretty straight line in the horizon.
The trees and stuff look somewhat correct
and it's all right of there's a little bit of warping and stretching here
because in general, when you're standing inside of the skydome
there's probably going to be things that are obstructing your view
from the actual horizon line.
It might be other endgame models, buildings, trees, that sort of thing.
Pretty happy with our relaxed.
Let's go ahead and close the relax window
and collapse and close our edit UVW
and then collapse the stack.
To do so we're just going to right-click on there.
Collapse all and hit yes.
Now our model is just about done.
The last thing we need to take a look at here
is you can see that all of our faces are facing outward.
They're not facing inward.
Since we're going to be inside the skydome, we need to fix that.
The simplest way is go to face mode.
Control A to select all of our geometry
and our edit polygons just to use the flip function.
Now all of our face will be pointing inward which is exactly what we need.
We can see too again from the inside all of our stretching is nearly gone.
Our sun is nice and spherical again.
Trees and tree lines and horizon look nice.
With this done we then export this to whatever package we're using it in.
Maybe we're keeping it inside 3ds Max to build an environment
or maybe it's going to UDK.
In this case, we'll take a look at our final in UDK again.
You could see here this is the end result.
Skydome looks great.
We replace this again at the origin of our world,
scale it up to encompass all of our geometry
and it would kind of create this fake atmosphere.
We hope you enjoyed this video.
Be sure to check more of our stuff at 3dmotive.com.
Thanks again.
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