Introduction

Bryce is a program that allows you to easily create environments that can work very nicely as skyboxs. Once you get a hang of it, you will be able to support your levels with strong environmental visuals.

Requirements

You need to prepare your environment to blend correctly with the new skybox you're about to make. Make a selection of colors taken from the general landscape. Do some research on your environment, taking into context the lighting you have set, time of day, area in the world (for realistic games) and weather. Use reference photography to support your decisions with the skybox.

Scene Setup

Create a new document, which will use the correct image setup. Make sure the Aspect Ratio is of 1:1 and that you select the appropriate size for your image - Typically 512x512 will be a good solution.

Go to the 'Sky & Fog' Menu at the top of your screen, and unlink the sun. This removes the sun from your scene, which allows you to get the sun's lighting, just without the sun in position, which means you can position the sun where you want in the WorldEditor.

The plan now is to render six different shots of the world, each with the camera facing different directions to allow the images to fit together.

Rendering Scenes

Once you edit scene, you will now have to render the images off. Using a base name for your skybox, you then have to make the different images, configuring the camera with the following xyz coordinates. The following would go like <name_of_skybox>_front.jpg. Once you have the camera setup, go to 'Render to Disk' in the main menu, and save the file.

Technical note: Most other 3D applications would call this a 90° FOV; Bryce field-of-view settings must be multiplied by 0.8 to get the "true" FOV.

Note: This article originally specified -90,0,0 for the "_up" image. However, when using this rotation the image was rotated 180 degrees in Bryce 6.

Finalisation

A simple way to general multiple Skybox, is to keep a template file for the .dml. Simply do a search & replace on the word 'blue'; replacing it with the name of your skybox. Delete all the commented notes, and save the file as <skyboxname>.dml. Keep the template file handy, but save it as a text file, so that Torque doesn't try and load it.

The image entitled 'blue_reflection' is used for reflections, but you can replace this with a different image.

blue_back 
blue_left 
blue_front 
blue_right 
blue_up 
blue_down 
blue_reflection 
noclouds 
noclouds 
noclouds