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Hi all,

Clogging your airwaves with another freebie.

Cubic Maps this time, they are being released because poor Baggers thought the seamless skies pack was a cubic map pack. sorry Baggers old chap. These ain't really skies as such, they are more crazy textures than normal. Great for crazy games I suppose. anyway, the usual free games only rule applies and you can use them in your compo entry if you want to as well. the pack de-compresses to around 70Mb with a total of 90 bitmaps.

screenie example thingie.


and the hefty 40Mb zip file!

http://members.thegamecreators.com/geecee3/media/cubemaps01.zip

cheers, grant.

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40mb?!? Damn... looks good anyway.

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You know you can save a lot of space saving these as CubeMap DDS, then could create a function in DBP to split them into thier 6 sides ready for CubeMap use, or they could be used as 3D Images in Shaders directly.

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Hehe, thanks Geecee !...wow they are even crazier that I expected...downloading now.

edit: well ive got a use for at least one so thats cool.
Theyll be great for crazy brackdrops for people making puzzle games.
Thanks again man.

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@drew , yup sorry about that, I don't use JPEG's

@raven, If I knew how to, I would, care to explain the process?

@Baggers, Go on m8, get them crazy games together.

I'm going to work on some sphere maps now, I have found a system that makes painting them very easy indeed without the annoying distortions at the top and bottom. and they are painted, not rendered, but they will be processed in photopaint.

cheerz, grant

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Downloading now.

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Very good, some of them are a bit zany for me but the cloud esque ones would make good cube maps...

Cheers!

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Working on a game called "Crazy World", this would be a huge help

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Hi all,

I have a new system for painting sphere textures and the first I have painted is by far the best planet texture i have ever made, I can't wait to share this lot with you, if your making anything to do with space and planets the next load of media will be right up your street. The sphere maps are more GPU friendly and a lot amaller in size, which means i can make quite a few to stick in a pack, I'll be including the atmospheres for the planets and various other spacey things including 3d models of ships and stuff, I'll post an example planet here when i'm happy with the result inside DBP.

cheers, grant.

PS. i'm really sorry about the file size of this pack, 40Mb is a bit on the large side, but like I said before, I hate JPEG or any other lossy compression for images. It's just one of those things i guess. Anyway, it's always better to work with a raw bitmaps until you are ready to publish your game, they are much more flexible and easier to edit than JPEG mince.

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hi

Just wondering why you don't use .png, since they are lossless and compression on them is nearly as good as .jpeg (sometimes better if the image has blocks of the same colour). Also they have a built in alpha channel which can be used to create some interesting effects, especially for particle explosions.

Anyways good work, its nice to see generousity in the community.

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cheers pizzaman,

PNG files eh? I may just give that a blast. and the alpha channel is an absolute bonus. I may convert everything to PNG files if I have no problems with them in DBP.
thanks for the pointers m8, info taken on board.

Grant.

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Woah... that's all I can say... geecee3, you are a GEM

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Amazing textures, the thing that amazes me is trying to think how these are made

Just another bit of advice on compression, try using a different method other than zip.
I found with rar compression I got this file down to 32.2mb and your sskies01 pack down from 8.94mb to 4.91mb, this was with "create solid archive" selected in winrar. I'm sure most people will have a decompressor for this and it saves a little more bandwidth.
Another method could be 7zip, but for the little bit of extra compression over rar, you may not find it worth the effort...

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Hi BigDan256,

Glad you like the textures m8, The process is actually quite simple, however you need 6 renders that match perfect at the edges to get it to work. this can be difficult with certain 3d software as the camera FOV settings are not always accurate.

for best results, these textures should be mapped to a subdivision cube which is almost sphere like in appearance, but actually has 4 main faces each made up of smaller surface patches, so it can be cube mapped properly. this helps with distortion and makes the skies stackable and rotatable without any faces intersecting and ruining the whole scene.

I have composed some REAL skies for your pleasure and dissection, I will be posting them soon, at the moment each cube map is over 6million pixels in size and impractical for game use. They will be resampled to 512x512 pixels making cubic maps of just over 1 million pixels each. Downsampling further still to a resolution of 256x256 should give cubic textures that can run on lowly graphics cards without too much problems.

keep watching this board for more shtuff.

cheers, grant.

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Right Folks,

I have had a look at the .PNG file type and it's lovely. So from now on, It looks like i'm going to be using PNG. this means the images can still be loaded direct into DBP, but using them as textures with certain 3d software will require conversion to a more suitable file format for some programs. The files look good when decompressed.

At the end of the day, this means is you get a quicker download and I don't get into bother for sucking up TGC's bandwidth. Thanks to pizzaman, I would never have tried .PNG files but you said the magic word 'lossless'.

The standard BMP filesize for a complete cube map set at 512X512 is 4.5Mb, with the PNG compression the same 4.5Mb fileset is now only 1.52Mb (this will vary with different cube maps). WOOT.

thanks all, grant.

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cooli could use them to try to make a thermal vision type effect.

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yeah man......

so how would you go about that then. I'm real curious. there are shaders that do thermal style vision.

cheers, grant.