TerraGen
A photo realistic terrain, water and sky renderer useful for making images of environments that can be placed on SkyBoxes.
Making Skybox textures with Terragen
[Terragen] is a free program that can make earthly or alien landscape images. You set up the sky color, cloud cover, sun position, terrain and tell the program to render the scene. It is easy to use and comes with many presets.
Once your environment is setup, you have to take snapshots of 5 views (top and 4 sides). You can use [TerraSky | http://www.geocities.com/pamoothican/terrasky_v100s.zip] to automate this process or perform it manually
Manually Rendering the Views
- The camera zoom level must be set to 1. If you choose a different zoom level, you will get texture alignment problems.
- Set the camera orientation head to 0. Set the pitch at 0. Hit the render image button and save as sky0.bmp.
- Set the camera orientation head to 90 (looking right); Hit the render image button and save as sky90.bmp.
- get it? now do the same with 180 and 270 degrees
- then set the head to 0 and pitch to 90 (looking up) and save
- If want a floor set the pitch to -90
- Convert the .bmp to .pcx in photoshop? or some other program, then import them to Unrealed
- The maximum size for the uregistered version of Terragen is 960x960. Resize in PS to 512x512 or 1024x1024
- Remember to give a nod to Terragen in you map's .txt file
- tip
The skybox brush size should be a multiple of your texture size.
ie: tex. size 512x512 make you brush 1024x1024x1024
This makes it very easy to line up your textures
If you encounter lines in your skybox, make the skybox brush 1~2 units less than your texture size (ie. 1022x1022)
U mapping flips the textures on import and placement.
Due to way Terragen renders and the parallax effect of the skybox only a simple cube is needed for the skybox brush. Spheres and cylinders are not necessary.
