'Generated sky': how does it work?

ent1ty · Post by **ent1ty** » Fri Apr 02, 2010 8:11 am

Hi, in commercial games, for sky there is often used a technology called generated sky. I tried googling it, but could not find anything. Does anyone have an idea how it works?

GameDude · Post by **GameDude** » Fri Apr 02, 2010 4:47 pm

Are you talking about a skybox? Irrlicht can render skyboxes or has a function on how to add them.

randomMesh · Post by **randomMesh** » Sat Apr 03, 2010 4:30 am

I think he means a Render-to-texture-skybox. There is one in the IrrExt repository.

ent1ty · Post by **ent1ty** » Sat Apr 03, 2010 8:49 am

Well, I'm not sure whether it is a render-to-texture-skybox, but it is used in commercial games and is called generated sky. The problem is, I don't know how it works.
It was used in Risen http://risen.deepsilver.com/blog/pages/ ... estion_140
result:

Pretty awesome, huh?

hybrid · Post by **hybrid** » Sat Apr 03, 2010 11:18 am

As a first approach, read up on Perlin noise. Next, think about nice gradients. Combining the two should already give a usable setting. Having professional sky quality is not an easy job, though, you can even buy libraries which just do this.

ent1ty · Post by **ent1ty** » Sat Apr 03, 2010 3:34 pm

Ok, thanks, it's a bit clearer now. However, I'd like to read some more about this and was wondering if there is some paper on the internet describing how this is done. Have anyone stumbled across something similar to this?

stefbuet · Post by **stefbuet** » Sat Apr 03, 2010 9:41 pm

http://www.pazystamo.projektas.lt/

ent1ty · Post by **ent1ty** » Sat Apr 03, 2010 10:05 pm

Yes, I know about that, but I don't think that that is generated sky

Anyway, thanks.

hybrid · Post by **hybrid** » Sat Apr 03, 2010 11:04 pm

Well, it does the coloring for you, you just need to generate the clouds on top of it.