Week 5 - Mid Week Update

Today I implemented my skybox into my Unreal Engine build. A skybox has the essential roll of creating the atmosphere of a game. It decides the emotion through pathetic fallacy, The art style through the realism of colours and textures, and governs time. 

Within a project that uses cel-shading you are almost immediately cut off from creating a skybox that boasts realism meaning you are already limited, or guided, depending on your outlook to creating a stylised and semi/full cartoon atmosphere. Thus with my custom sky box I decided to go with creating a highly saturated and multi coloured build. This will reflect in my environment as my desire is to create the texturing within my level to also be of equal saturation in colour. An example of a cel-shaded game on the market that does this well is a game called Dungeon Defenders. I believe their game is incredibly attractive and its because of its over saturated low polygon modelling that it achieves this. However a game such as Border Lands with its more realistic approach to texturing has a semi-realistic skybox. It ultimately depends on your vision. 

The very simple word for word guide of creating a custom made skybox within Unreal Engine 4 - 

Model a sphere - Cut it in half - Squash vertically - Unwrap - Relax the selection - Fit it to the box - Export as FBX. 

Find a seamless panoramic photo (I bought one so its licensing is legal) - Squash into a 2048 x 2048 square - Polar Coordinate so it becomes spherical - (I then applied a healing brush towards the seams to fix the image) - Save as TGA. 

Create a new file - access RGB layers - Select red - Add clouds (as they are seamless) - Draw realistic clouds ontop.

Select green - Add clouds - Add noise - Reduce levels so you get star effects -

Select blue - Create a sphere - Blur it 

In unreal - Create blue print, import textures - then follow the guide to creating the blueprints for an animation. I can't type this out as its extensive 

Here is the link to a pdf of a guide i used -> I highly reccomend. He was building this within UDK which is the platform before UE4. So some aspects such as the ASE exporting of a model doesn't work. FBX does however. 

https://juarez3d.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/tutorial_animated_skydome_v1-3.pdf

This is a snap shot of my custom made skybox within my UE4 project!