This post brings together several resources that I feel are essential to consider when installing a WordPress blog.

Moving to a generic site design will allow us to move our focus away from the Unreal Engine and into different subject areas, and organise the content into clear categories.

Visitors now have the ability to post comments and feedback on each page and posting.

With a search function and larger font size, the site is more accessible and easier to read.

• Skybox Textures
• HDRShop
• ATI CubeMapGen
• An Image Editing Program (Such as Adobe Photoshop / Jasc Paint Shop Pro).

Please note that the software featured in this tutorial may be free for non-commercial use only. Please refer to the licence agreements for further detail.

• Step One: Create Skybox Textures
• Step Two: Create a Skybox Cross
• Step Three: Edit & Convert Image
• Step Four: Crop Image
• Step Five: Import Skydome Into UnrealED

If you already have skybox textures, you can skip this step. If not, you will need to create your own. Skyboxes are fairly easy to generate using a variety of programs. I would recommend the free version of Terragen 2, available here. The creation of your initial skybox textures is beyond the scope of this tutorial, however further Terragen 2 tutorials are available below.

• Terragen 2 Tutorials
• How to Output Skybox Textures with Terragen 2

Note that the quality of your skydome will depend on the resolution and quality of your skybox textures. I would recommend textures of at least 1024 x 1024, where possible. For this tutorial, I used a basic skybox which I created using Terragen 2;

Open up the ATI CubeMap Generator (click to download). At first, the user interface to this program appears to be complicated, but the following steps are fairly straight forward. The sphere shown in the main screen is your preview window, and we will be using the tools on the right to import our skybox textures.

Clicking the following button will bring a drop down menu. Each line refers to a different facet of your skybox.

Select the top line, ‘X+ Face’, and click the ‘Load CubeMap Face’ button to import your first texture.

X+ and X- refers to your north and south skybox faces.
Y+ and Y- refers to your top and bottom skybox faces.
Z+ and Z- refers to your west and east skybox faces.

Select each face and import each texture one at a time, ensuring that the textures are aligned correct on your preview sphere. You can rotate the sphere by using your left mouse button to drag it. Note that you may have to flip or rotate your textures to align them correctly using the ‘Flip Face’ buttons, especially the top and bottom.

The result should look similar to the sphere below. Once complete, click ‘Save Cube Cross’, and save using the .bmp format. Click yes if a dialogue box appears. You may now close the ATI CubeMap Generator.

Before we import our newly created ‘cube cross’ into HDRShop to create a skydome texture, we need to make a couple of minor adjustments to the image. Open up your ‘cube cross’ in an image editing program (such as Photoshop or Paint Shop Pro). What we now need to do is duplicate the very edge pixels on each of the four quadrants, and carry them over onto the blank edge space by one pixel.

This is important, as when we convert the image to a skydome, rounding errors in the process can cause some pixels to ‘leak over’ and mix into the final image, causing a slight curve of rouge pixels to appear in our final image. Duplicating the edge pixels of the cross into the blank space in all four quadrants eliminates this issue since the pixels that leak over are always relevant.

Finally, save your image as an 24-bit uncompressed .tga (Targa) file. Although its possible to save the image as a 24-bit .bmp and import into HDRShop, this may degrade the quality of your skybox!

In HDRShop:

• Open up your newly created cube map (cross) in HDRShop (click to download).

• Click ‘OK’ to the ‘Camera Response Curve’ dialogue box that will appear. Note that initially you’ll be zoomed into the image. You may need to right click the image and zoom out a few times for your sky to be shown.

• If your image is upside down, flip it by clicking ‘Image > Transform > Flip Vertical’.

• Convert your image to skydome by clicking ‘Image > Panorama > Panoramic Transform’

In the ‘Panoramic Transform’ dialogue, set the following properties;

Source image format: ‘Cubic Environment (Vertical Cross)’
Destination image format: ‘Latitude/Longitude’
Width / Height: 2048 / 1024

Note: If you are using very high resolution textures, you may be able to set a higher width/height.

Click ‘OK’, and you should now have a panoramic texture, which is almost ready to be applied to a skydome;

Save this image in .bmp format, and click yes to the display setting dialogue that will appear.

Open up your shiny new panoramic bitmap with an image editing program (such as Photoshop or Paint Shop Pro). We only require the top half of this image, so you will need to crop the bottom half of your image.

Note that you must crop exactly half of your image. The final length and width of your image must be a power of two (512, 1024, 2048, etc). You will not be able to import your texture into UnrealED if your cropping was one pixel too short.

Open up your map within the editor and then the generic browser by clicking ‘View > Browser Windows > Generic’. In the top-left of the browser, check Textures, Materials, and Static Meshes, and uncheck anything else. Click ‘File > Import’, and select your skydome texture.

Enter the following properties, and click ‘OK’;

Tick ‘Defer Compression’

Package: Must be the name of your map (minus the file extension) in order to embed the texture. For example WAR-Torlan.
Group: This may be left blank.
Name: A name for your skydome texture. For example, MySky_Tex.

By now, your skydome texture should be visible in UnrealED as follows;

Before moving on, we need to ensure the texture isn’t automatically compressed, because this will degrade the quality of the sky. Right-click on your imported texture, and select ‘Texture Viewer’. Select the following options;

Tick ‘CompressionFullDynamicRange’

Compression Settings: ‘TC_HighDynamicRange’

Don’t worry if your texture turns bright or strange as a result of this. Next, we need to create a material. In the generic browser window, click ‘File > New’.

Enter the following properties, and click ‘OK’;

Package: Must be the name of your map (minus the file extension) in order to embed the texture. For example WAR-Torlan.
Group: This may be left blank.
Name: A name for your skydome material. For example, MySky_Mat.
Factory: Material

A new material will appear in your browser window. Right click the material, then select ‘Material Editor’. A screen, similar to the following will appear;

Right click an empty gray space, and add a ‘New TextureSample’. You can use the left mouse button to navigate around the material editor, and middle mouse button to zoom in and out.

Back in your generic browser window, click onto your skybox texture once to highlight it. Back in your material editor, add this texture to your material by clicking the small green arrow, as shown below;

To complete the material, drag a line between the black square on the left of your texture, to ‘Diffuse’. Drag another line between the black square and ‘Emissive’. You should end up with something like this:

You may now close the editing window, saving any changes.

Creating your SkyDome

Finally, we can now create our skydome.

• Open the ‘UN_Sky’ package from your generic browser by clicking ‘File > Open’. It’s located in X:\XXXX\UT\UTGame\CookedPC\Environments – ‘X’ refers to your game directory. Locate the package in the bottom-left section of the generic browser, and click on it once to highlight its content.

• Locate the static mesh named ‘S_UN_Sky_SM_SkyDome03′, and select it once to highlight it.

• In the 3D view, navigate to the center of your map, right-click, and select ‘Add Actor > Add Static Mesh’.

• Double click the static mesh (skydome) which appears, to enter the properties screen.

• Navigate to the ‘Materials’ property, then add a material by clicking on the green ‘+’. Select your material in the generic browser, and add your material to the static mesh using the green arrow.

Resize the skydome to surround your level. Your skydome is now visible in-game!

Special Thanks to Fenring for allowing me to update and expand his original Battlefield 2 tutorial for UnrealED.

This tutorial uses the Terragen 2 – Technology Preview 1 (Free Version), which is available from the official Planetside Software website. Note that the interface and ability of Terragen 2 is likely to change. Additionally, a plug-in which automates this process is likely to be delevoped at some point.

Terragen 0.9 users - download and use the skybox script instead!

First of all we need to set up six cameras, and configure each one to point in the relevant direction, which will form the basis of our screenshots.

If you haven’t yet created your scene/sky, click here to download a template file, which is already set up for you (this crashes on some computers, unsure why). You can then skip to Step Two.

If you have already created your scene/sky, or want to complete these steps manually, you’ll need to put in some additional work. Complete steps 1 to 4 below.

1. Navigate to the Renderers screen, using the buttons at the top of the screen.

Select "/Full Render" then click the ‘…’ button next to the cameras field, and select ‘Create New Camera > Camera’ from the menu that appears. Do this five times (not six, as we already have one camera). Ignore any other settings at the moment.

2. Navigate to the Cameras screen, using the buttons at the top of the screen. You should see six cameras on the list.

Click on the first camera, and enter the following settings;

Name: North
Position: 0.0001 / 0 / 0
Rotation: 0 / 0 / 0

Check the ‘Perspective’ option, and the ‘Use horizontal FOV’ option. Use a horizontal FOV of 90 (This is 90 degrees).

Note: Terragen will crash if you render a camera position of all zero. To get around this, I used the tiny value of 0.001

Your first camera should look like this:

Configure the remaining cameras using the following settings. This should be clear enough – but refer to the above image if you are unsure of where to enter these.

3. Navigate to the Renderers screen, using the buttons at the top of the screen.

Select Full Render, and enter the follow settings;

Note: The free version of Terragen 2 limits the resolution to 800 x 600. Unreal can only import powers of two, therefore the best size we can obtain is 512 x 512).

For your full render settings, you may wish to ramp up all your quality settings. Setting the Global Illumination settings to 0 will ensure your skybox does not have any seams. However, it may reduce the quality of your scene. You have to tweak other settings, such as your cloud color, which is covered in the next section.

For your Quick render settings, set the same Global Illumination settings as above and use your discretion in setting your image dimensions and quality. We will use the quick render to ensure your skybox fits together how you like, before wasting hours of render time!

4. Save this file as a template for future skyboxes. If you have already created your sky, you may wish to configure and save a blank template separately.

Now that everything is set up, it’s time to create, tweak, and test your scene/sky before rendering it.

If you haven’t yet created your scene, now is the time to create your scene exactly how you like it. This tutorial will not teach you how to use terragen 2 or how to create your sky.

If you have already created your scene, you may need to tweak it. Specifically, you may need to lower your terrain, and alter your cloud color. Remember that your scene will be rendered from the camera’s view at the origin, so you want to concentrate on only the areas that will be visible. Remember to make back ups!

Testing Your Skybox
Rendering your skybox in Terragen 2 takes a long time, even on today’s computers. Depending on your computer and quality settings, your skybox renders could even take days! This is why it is crucial to render a small, low quality version of your skybox first, to ensure your images line up without seams.

You can do this as follows;

1. Navigate to the Renderers screen, using the buttons at the top of the screen. Select ‘Quick Render’, and ensure your image dimensions and quality settings are low.

Select the correct camera. Click the ‘…’ button next to the cameras field, and select ‘Assign Camera > /North’ from the menu that appears.

Click on ‘Render Image’, and wait for your image to render (Shouldn’t take long!). Save your render as ‘north.bmp’, close the render box, and select your next camera, /East. Render and save each image appropriately.

2. Open your favorite image program, and create a new, large, blank image. This should be large enough to contain all of your renders, with some surplus space.

Open each of your render images, and place them on to the blank image you created. You should be able to drag each of your render images around, and position them side by side (north, south, east, west). Ensure it looks correct, and that there are no visible seams.

If everything is good, you can close your image program, delete your low quality renders, and start to render your new, high quality screen shots.

Note: There is other methods that you can use to check your skybox, but I find this the quickest and easiest.

Rendering will take a long time, and you won’t be able to do much else on your computer during this time (Otherwise you’ll slow your render). The highest quality settings can easily take over a day!

After rendering, you should now have a good, high quality Terragen 2 skybox, ready to import!

• This tutorial uses UnrealED 3.0 (Unreal Tournament 2003/4).
• It assumes that you have a basic knowledge of the Unreal Editor.

• Creating a Simple Skybox
• Working with TC_Clamp
• Using Custom Skyboxes
• Using Fog Rings

What are you waiting for? Pull up a chair, get yourself a coffee/beer, and let’s dive straight in! Firstly, we need to choose a Skybox. Open the UnrealED texture browser, and open the ‘SkyRenders.utx’ package. All these steps are highlighted by the circles on the image below. This will show all of the skybox textures within that package. If you are working with a game other than Unreal Tournament 2004, you will need to locate a package which contains skybox textures yourself.

For this tutorial, I’m going to be using the snowy blue sky skybox, which looks like the image below. It can be found by scrolling down the texture browser. You can choose a different one if you like (If you want to use a custom skybox, you may want to read our notes further down the page).

Open your map (or a fresh one) and Right-Click the cube brush tool (Shown by a red circle in the image below). Important: The height/width/breadth need to be the same size as as the skybox textures you are working with. This is why we chose our skybox before we create our cube. Type your values in the Height, Width, and Breadth fields, then click build. Our snowy skybox has dimensions of 512 x 512, so we entered 512 into all values.

Next, position the box where you want it by moving the red builder brush (Usually a good place is below and away from the level, where it will never be seen). Click the subtract button (red circle in the image) to subtract this cube from your world. You should be left with the result shown.

Now it’s time to apply textures to our skybox. Click on each side of your cube once to highlight it, then select the relevant texture from the texture browser to apply it. You’ll notice the texture names of the skybox textures usually have a direction at the end, such as ‘east’ or ’90′. This is the angle/side that the texture should be used for the skybox to fit, so apply them in the correct order, ‘north’ then ‘east’ etc.

Now you may be thinking “But I can’t see the textures, they are just all blue and stretched looking?!”, right? Well…

When using certain official skybox textures, they can appear stretched to the extent that they look striped. These behave a little odd because they have their Clamp Mode set to TC_clamp set in the texture properties. This can be an issue when converting UT2K3 maps into UT2K4. There is a number of work-arounds to this, but you want to learn how to do it properly, right?

Not all skyboxes will do this. If your skybox aligned perfectly then you can skip over the next short section.

Select all the wall surfaces, right-click, and select ‘align > face’ from the menu (The textures will still show up striped). Now with all four walls selected, right-click and go to the ‘surface properties’. Next click the Pan/Rot/Scale tab. You’ll have a box that looks like this:

This is the tool we are going to use to get everything aligned properly. The Pan option moves the texture up or across by however many units you press. e.g. pressing U: 4 will move the texture by 4 units. It’s basically a more accurate version of the texture moving tool. The rotation tool, yep, you guessed it, rotates the texture.

Pan one unit in the U and V, and the textures will start to look clearer, though still not aligned. Next Pan the U by 64 four times, and the walls should look aligned. The floor and ceiling are a different matter however and require a bit more work. It’s literally a case of getting the rotation correct and panning in both directions until they are perfect.

Using TC_Clamp is far superior to any other method for creating skyboxes. It just takes a bit of patience to familiarize yourself with the quirks of its behavior, but worth it in the long run.

Skybox Losing Alignment After Rebuilds..
As mentioned above, this is also an issue with TC_Clamp. When you first put in a skybox it may be perfect, then you notice several rebuilds later it has become streaky. Align the textures to face once again, then pan one UU horizontal and vertical. Now Highlight the skybox subtract, and then the rest of your actors inside the skybox Move the skybox to where the yellow subtract lines match where the streaks start. Rebuild level If streaks appear again readjust. It takes a couple tries sometimes. For some reason BSP cuts in your game level affect TC_Clamp.

(Many thanks to King Mango of Unreal Playground for the TC_Clamp info!)

Now that we have our skybox, it’s time to make it work. Important: Select all the textures within your cube, right-click, and select properties. Click on the ‘Flags’ tab. Select the ‘Unlit’ checkbox. Next, exit the properties and open the actor browser. In he actor browser, expand ‘Info’ by clicking the plus (+) beside it, expand ‘ZoneInfo’, and click once on ‘SkyZoneInfo’ to highlight it.

Back in your 3D view, right-click your skybox base and click ‘Add SkyZoneInfo’ from the menu that appears. Use your top and side 2-D view panels to move the skyzone in to the center of your skybox. So, by now you should have something which looks like this:

Hit F8 and rebuild your level. You may also want to save. There is just one more step left to do! Next we need to define where the sky will be visible in our level. in your 3D view, go to the area where you want your sky. Right-click the texture (e.g. the ceiling), go into the properties, and select the ‘Fake Backdrop’ flag. Note that this must be BSP. The area you selected should now vanish and your sky should be visible! Now not only do you have the satisfaction of having created a skybox, you also did it the professional way using the TC_Clamp clamping mode.

As you may realize, this is a very simple skybox, especially compared to some maps, but this should give you an understanding of how they work. You should have realized that whatever surrounds the SkyInfo actor is what your sky will look like. You can use your imagination to create something beyond a basic cube, using meshes, emitters, brushes, and even terrain. Refer to the ‘Advanced Skyboxes’ section for some examples. It’s also worth noting that simple custom skyboxes can sometimes be very effective!

Editor Tip:
You can create your own beautiful skyboxes easily using TerraGen and the skybox kit. See our useful editing tools page for for information! Skyboxes can also be downloaded from the internet.

Custom skyboxes can be created in the same way as above. However, some skybox images (such as those generated by TerraGen) can look imperfect. If you create a small skybox, the edges of the skybox (the corners) can show a fine line in-game. This can be fixed by using a larger skybox (you would have to scale up the textures appropriately) or in some cases editing the skybox in your favorite image editing program.

Fog rings can enable you to remove pop-up on large maps. They are basically ring-shaped static meshes that you place inside your skybox. They start with a solid color at the bottom, and fade out into transparency at the top. They can be used to add depth, or just for decoration, but their main use is to hide pop-up in large maps. It basically fakes fog in the skybox.

When creating a large map, such as an Onslaught map, the editor will only render a certain distance before chopping off the distance. This draw-distance is a limitation of the editor and cannot be changed. This can be hidden however, by using fog throughout the level the same color as the fog ring. The architecture/terrain will fade to the fog color at a distance, and once faded, won’t be visible in front of the fog ring. So when it does become chopped off in-game, it will not be visible to the player.

The minor draw-back is that no detail can be placed in the bottom half of the skybox, so if a player flies high, or is in a location where a lot of the vertical skybox should be seen, the bottom half of the skybox is a dull, solid, color. The height of the fog-ring will depend on how high you build your level. Generally the higher your architecture, the higher your fog-ring must be in order to hide the pop up.

Finding and Using a Fog Ring…

First of all build you skybox using the textures you want to use. Do not add too much detail in the lower area of your skybox as of yet, as you may find your fog ring will hide much of this detail.

Next, we need to find a fog ring to match your skybox. Fog-rings are quite scarce for UT2K4, here are a few examples of static mesh packages that I’ve found them in, along with their relevant colors…

BarrenHardware-epic, under Decos > egypt (Sand/Peach)
CP_Nightmare_1-epic, under Arches (Red)

A quick and easy way to find a fog ring is to paste one from another official map. This practice isn’t encouraged, but if you have to, here is some fog rings…

ONS-Dawn (Grey)
ONS-FrostBite (Plum)
ONS-Torlan (Light Orange)
ONS-Dria (Dark Blue)
ONS-Tricky (Brown)
ONS-RedPlanet (Red)
ONS-Surripere (Blue)

The next step is to place your fog ring into your skybox, resizing it as necessary If you copied one, paste it in. If you found one, select the fog ring inside the static mesh window by clicking it once, then right-click the ground anywhere in your level and click “Add static mesh…”. Your fog ring should appear before your very eyes. If you don’t see it, try to locate it using your 2D views.

Next, using your 2D views, move the fog ring into your skybox. It should be vertically centered, at roughly the same level as your skybox info actor. It may help to adjust it whilst viewing the sky from within your level. You may need to resize it to fit – use the boxes at the bottom of the editor to change the values to change the size of your skybox as you see fit, as shown in the image below.

For the vertical size, the fog ring should be high enough so that it hides all pop up in your level, and low enough so that the player cannot see beneath it. The width of the ring isn’t too important, so long as it is centered. You should end up with a result similar to the image above. If you can’t get the lower half covered, you can duplicate the fogring, turn it upside-down, and join them. A quick was to do this is to put a minus value into your DrawScale3D.

Fog Rings can be darkened/brightened by changing their Unlit value to false, and altering the AmbientGlow value (Both can be found in: Properties > Display). If you can’t find a fog-ring to suit your map, you can always create your own custom shader to apply to the mesh, by importing your texture and changing the fog ring’s skin (Also located in Properties > Display).

Adding Fog:
Next, in your 3D view, locate your Zone Info actor for your outdoor areas. If you don’t have any ZoneInfo actors in your map yet, now is the time to add them. If you do, skip the next step.

ZoneInfo actors set individual properties, such as fog color and density, for designated areas, or ‘zones’. If you don’t split your level into zones, your entire level will be one ‘zone’, and you will only need one ZoneInfo actor. This tutorial won’t go into zones, and what they are used for. You do not need to know about zones to complete this tutorial, however you may wish to look this up yourself.

Adding a ZoneInfo Actor:
Open your actor browser (Chess piece button) and expand Info, and click ZoneInfo once to highlight it. In your 3D view, right-click the ground anywhere and click “Add ZoneInfo”. An icon similar to the skybox info should appear. You do not need to reposition this, although you may wish to reposition this in a visible place so you can find it should you want to get back to it.

Next, double-click your ZoneInfo actor to open it’s properties.

It’s worth rebuilding all at this point, so that you will be able to see the changes in the fog you apply in the next step (Shortcut: F8).

Change fog color and distances inside the properties using the options shown in the image below. The fog color should be exactly the same as the color of the fog ring. The DistanceFogStart and DistanceFogEnd should be self explanatory; the end value is the distance where the architecture is invisible.

You should now see no or very little pop-up in your map. All that is left for you to do is tweak the fogging and your skybox to your liking.