Thread by @delaneykingrox

Haven't done a #gamedev #gameart tip in a while, so here is a quickie:

SKYDOMES DON'T NEED TO BE A BIG DOME WITH ONE BIG TEXTURE.

You can create compelling skies using custom geometry which can have multiple cuts to allow for a second UV channel. This allows you to sample and blend multiple aspects of your sky in the shader.

For example, your moons can be crystal sharp high res, but the rest low.

You can blend several layers in your shader together to make a sky that has one draw call, but features things such as rolling clouds, sun movement and so forth.

One thing I tend to do is slice the sky sphere into a dome, so it isn't included when you look down...

Another common thing I will do is have the horizon on a cylinder or series of planes rather than on the skydome itself.

This allows me to add subtle details like blinking the city lights slightly to suggest atmosphere and distorting the UVs for heat haze.

If you think of your sky as a color gradient with clouds over the top, your shader can do this by LERP (linear interpolating) several colours using the U or V channel of a UV texture coordinate node.

This gives you absolutely smooth, flawless gradients that a texture cannot

By doing cloud layers in the shader, you lessen draw calls- at the cost of every fragment of your sky costing more (a fragment is each pixel drawn of your screen/buffer).

So you need to think which cost is slowing you down more. Draw calls, shader complexity or overdraw

Once you have created your skydome scene, it may contain several meshes and shaders, some lights etc you can capture this as an HDR skydome image to use for reflections.
Check your manual for this.

My advice is to concept art skydomes first in the context of the level geo, to give you an idea of the colors, complexity and values you want.

A complex scene benefits from a simple sky, and vice versa.

Another really cool way to process your skydome is assembling them inside Substance and generating them from a substance in engine. This includes transforms to place clouds, colors and filters.

This allows you to adjust the skydome in game and get the perfect composition.

Hope that helps.

Support my shitposting here:

Ko-fi.com/dellak

Oh and don't just graph photo reference, grab video reference.

Even subtle things like eroding the layers of clouds in and out over a long time gives life to the environments.
Subtle animated color noise over stars makes them twinkle and pulse.
Make the sky breathe

Even the most basic environment can be made to feel epic, limitless, oppressive, empowering, sparkling, wondrous, huge, merciless, motherly, foreboding, ashamed.

Artists can push emotions to players.

Just wheeling the skydome or adding very rare particle spawns can do a lot.

Great skydome artists are not just texture artists. X