Custom skies

[Terin]

Awesome. I guess Hired Gun wants all custom made maps to use the same 4 skyboxes. Well, once the tag extractor is released, we'll get a few more skyboxes to use. =|

[Stealth]

there might be a way to make a "Fake" Sky boxe, make a dom over the map, and just skin it with moving skins or something like that.

[jahrain]

Halo 2 does not support implementation of new .render_models.

In other words, with our current tools we cannot do it. Check out Jahrain's model upgrader.

His upgrader won't work for sky models, sadly.

I hope that some type of tool will support this soon. Or the knowledge of how to fix it will be available. I've been trying to target out the problem variables, but I suck with hex.

The tool does work with skyboxes. All you have to do is export a sphere, get it working as a crate or scenery model, then use the model as a sky. I'm working on a set of tutorials that show how to get custom weapons, bipeds, crates, skies, scenery etc. ingame using the tool as well as some other tools to facilitate the process such as a collision model upgrader.

[et_cg]

So you're talking about "faking" the skybox, correct? Well I've been trying it, and I'm having some troubles.

[jahrain]

So you're talking about "faking" the skybox, correct? Well I've been trying it, and I'm having some troubles.

There no "faking" involved. You just attach the .render_model to the sky tag. The sky tag can scale the render model, so you can just make it as a small crate or scenery for testing before assigning it to the sky tag. Just remember you need to get the face orientation correct, which is the hard thing to do with the app.

[et_cg]

Okay, well I can test it using the "faking" method. And it works.

Works better than the attaching it to the sky tag, tbh. I think this is what may be causing the problem:

08.03.07 17:43:14.807 ### ERROR geometry 'scenarios\skies\multi\halo\*classified*\*classified*_sky' shader 'scenarios\skies\multi\halo\*classified*\shaders\sky_dusk' is transparent but was imported as opaque

I have this problem on all the shaders. When I load up the same model that works for the scenery, it doesn't work for the sky.

So I was wondering if you could maybe figure out how to change the import value of each shader type for this. Because from what I understand is there's two.

A) Opaque Shadow-Casting
B) Transparent

If you could please help by offering the second option of the two in your upgrader, that'd be cool. I think that's my main problem for all this not working.

[jahrain]

Okay, well I can test it using the "faking" method. And it works.

Works better than the attaching it to the sky tag, tbh. I think this is what may be causing the problem:

08.03.07 17:43:14.807 ### ERROR geometry 'scenarios\skies\multi\halo\*classified*\*classified*_sky' shader 'scenarios\skies\multi\halo\*classified*\shaders\sky_dusk' is transparent but was imported as opaque

I have this problem on all the shaders. When I load up the same model that works for the scenery, it doesn't work for the sky.

So I was wondering if you could maybe figure out how to change the import value of each shader type for this. Because from what I understand is there's two.

A) Opaque Shadow-Casting
B) Transparent

If you could please help by offering the second option of the two in your upgrader, that'd be cool. I think that's my main problem for all this not working.

I don't know if that is even a value in the model tags. I wouldn't know where to look but I will look into it. Does the skybox work and not give any errors if you use only opaque shaders? For testing, I have only made skyboxes using non transparent shaders just by rendering a spherical map of a sky to use a sky texture and applying it to a large sphere.

[et_cg]

Using Opaque shaders does not spit out the error, but I see no geometry with textures > even if I "fake it."