I have again been experimenting with domes.
The picture below has a new dome I just made, the texture still needs improving, but that's NOT water, its the FOG!
(http://www.bzcomplex.com/gallery/albums/userpics/10062/domexp.png)
I used a cylinder to make the dome, it has a bottom, another piece of it is in front of the horizon, then I make a 1024x1024 dxtbz2 texture, with three stripes of different effects, It scrolls in the u direction. using alpha channels both the fog and horizon textures are transparent and blend with what is behind them as they scroll, the effect looks a bit like a heat hazy horizon and water.
Its a bit weird, as you zoom up and down the hills it looks like the sea is coming in and going out in the distance, and my desert map now looks like a little island every time you get up high :)
The fog looks nice!
But not quite right.
I should have said it looks "toxic" :)
Anyone else got any idea's on how to chop up and rearrange one primitive shape and turn it into a fantastic outer-space environment that uses only one scrolling texture? :lol:
Sadly stars only cover the upper hemisphere, so any realy spiffy things would likely be mostly on the bottom. Perhapse a giant spinning wormhole or blackhole with a massive space battle overhead.
(Can't spell check in STEAM beta overlay, so if anything is unreadable.)
I am wondering if any dll/scriptor wizards can figure out if dome.xsi,s can be animated at all?
I could probably make a dome that has a continent sized spacecraft hovering over the map, but it would be damn cool if I could make it move too.
You could try connecting 2 sphere primitives with an elongated cube or cylinder object to form a pathway of sorts. Or split a sphere, flip one half 180 degrees to form 2 dome objects connected the same way. I prefer this method as you'd end up with 2 very flat floor surfaces to build other objects up from. If you want a less rounded dome then you could eliminate the lower sections to get a much lower profile dome. I think you can also achieve the same effect by rescaling the dome along the X Y axises; at least that's the way it's done in Truespace.
Every attempt by me to use more than one frame or primitive has resulted in a perfectly good looking model looking badly mangled when viewed as a dome.Yes you can split 1 sphere etc into pieces and rearrange them to make all sorts of shapes, Planets, ring worlds, etc etc.
So I have taken a new approach of making a textured dome model from one primitive with one big texture made up of the different textures I want to use. this works as long as you either want everything scrolled, or not at all. You can control the speed and direction of the scrolling to some extent by how you UV map the model. Alpha channel transparency's work fine in domes.
sky domes can be done to make stars appear all over the shot if you want them too..
go to the BZ2MD boards and PM slaor about how he did it in EPIC. ive asekd him a lot of questions and hes been very helpful