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Re: My technical disection of the Reach trailer | |
Posted By: Eiii <eri3ch@gmail.com> | Date: 12/20/09 12:20 a.m. |
In Response To: Re: My technical disection of the Reach trailer (Stephen L. (SoundEffect)) : Think of the skybox as a sphere around the character's eyes (the camera). : Even if you can get out ofa level, the reason you can never get any closer : to 'the sky' is that the sphere is fixed to the camera. Moving forward : like walking isn't so much moving you closer to the sky, but rather moving : the terrain beneath you in the opposite direction. This was how it seemed : to work for Halo 1 and 2 for instance. o.o I don't think we're on the same page. I know what a skybox is, as you describe it-- what the source engine does to achieve its pretty geometry-laden skyboxes is actually render the textures (not the appropriate word to use there, but I don't know what is) that make up the skybox from a scaled-down piece of geometry on the map. So, somewhere in most HL2/TF2/L4D map geometries is a little out-of-the-way box with tiny buildings and everything that makes up the skybox. This way the skies are more than just a flat painting that looks a long way off-- because actual geometry is being used as a source (and the camera used to source it is moving around based on the player's position), you can achieve an actual sense of scale and distance in skyboxes. Heck, you can have skybox stuff be twenty feet away from the player, out of reach; as long as it 'flows' with the map geometry it won't look odd since everything renders correctly perspective-wise. Very helpful tool. ANYWAY, the reason I say that Halo 2 uses this system is that you can glitch a ragdoll through part of Burial Grounds and the body will show up, as huge, in the sky! So, to generate the skybox some textures are being sourced in realtime and then thrown up as a sky. What's suprising then is that no campaign or MP maps I can think of take advantage of this fact by putting geometry in the skybox to make things pop a little more, instead of looking all flat (and still pretty!) like they do now.
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