I randomly got back into mapping and was inspired to make some beautiful skybox and lighting I studied from photos and videos of total solar eclipses and have this idea for a map. I was going to make the core in the center and have it EXPOSED from all sides for hoards of monsters to march down the hills from every direction! I was thinking of making destructible geometry in the map (movers). I do not have a name for the map yet other than it's initial filename for what the geometry resembles. Some interesting things I have done is I modified the CylinderBuilder brush builder to make random geometry by changing the radius to random values on each side. I also made 12 different versions of firepaint stars that twinkle and have different placement on each one and randomly applied different ones to the inside of a sphere to make the sky look more natural instead of a repeating tile pattern of the same star texture like I did on CTF-WC-Strongholds. For some reason FerailDragon's NW3 nukes look beautiful here. When I'm short of ideas it's a lot of fun hitting my summon everydamn naliweapons there is hotkey and picking it all up and blowing stuff up It just looks nice on the skyline. I spent a lot of time on the skyline trying to make the perfect gradient studying photos and trying to mix the colors right. I am just letting my imagination run... let's see how far it takes me. Well anyways TL|DR is over let's see some screenshots THEY ARE OUTDATED BTW maybe I'll add more due to the flavor of openGL driver I use so when I use the shot command I get THIS:


Anyhow here are the screenshots











And now I have the PERFECT Idea for a skybox lens flare script maybe I can imitate some blooming with the horizon orange so I'm off!

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Maan that looks awesome!
12 textures, huh? Nice!
Also, a tip: The Sunrise/Sunset looks different depending on which part of the world you're in and the season. So if you want to make it look like a Middle West themed map, you should try searching for more specific pictures of that place!

Can't wait to try this on Gauntlet!

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Experimenting with this new bloom effect. Not the best on performance but looks nice





Also was wasn't sure if I was ever going to make this look right but I managed to pull off a lens flare for the solar eclipse

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Oh man... that's so awesome. I'm inspired now.
What about a half solar eclipse?

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To make things REALLY ridiculous, how about a Hollow Moon?

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Actually the skybox is more so a cross between a cylinder and a sphere.

Pictured below the cylinder with a nicely aligned texture.



It's a 512x512 pixels in size and it was a bitch to align on that 24 sided cylinder.

Such a pain I had to make a little alignment tool texture to help me align it perfectly.




Before I aligned all that it looked something like this




So yes it was a pain in the ass I had to touch every side and align it to a certain offset and with no cheap tricks to bail me out this time, just tedious labor but the end result was good
Here's a bottom view of the whole thing notice the small dots are stars obviously you won't see all the detail in this low resolution but still just take a glance at it.


What I want you to see is how I tried to mix the fire paint stars textures up a lot to make the stars diverse and natural looking and this is the look in UnrealED's texture usage view below in the screenshot.


I made a lot of different fire paint textures 11 of them with different arrangements of stars. Since there is no such thing as export a fire paint or duplicate I renamed the fire paint texture saved the map and went back to a previous version of the map renamed it reloaded the previous again renamed and repeated till I had 11 fire paint star texture templates to work with and vary and tried to randomly paint the sides of the sphere with it



I made the gradient by studying images of solar eclipses here are some various images I studied from Google image search
Here is the results page: https://www.google.com/search?q=solar+eclipse+sky&safe=off&rls=com.microsoft:en-US:IE-Address&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ei=OddoUoakDImTkQf_4YBQ&ved=0CAcQ_AUoAQ&biw=1438&bih=706




Like a lot of graphics I made I love to generate it with a media generator in Sony Vegas 11 and pile on lots of delicious video fx I love generated media and that's what this image below is a nice gradient based off what I studied form other images and did a white radial gradient with subtractive blending to give that curve. Photoshop CS4 sealed the deal with how it handles 256 color images nicely. I had to use a different kind of diffusion method for the final rendering because the color table was filled up and the gradient was going all steps and bars on me but it turned out alright.

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Very clever!
What inspired you to do all of this?

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Teh HaxX0rz, obviously

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Necrosis MHS

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"These Errors, They Don't Make Any Sense!" "Your Face Doesn't Make Any Sense!"

Rurik just showed me these screenshots elsewhere, excellent work! It looks like it will be a very beautiful map.