Making Sky Boxes with Terragen

This page last edited: 01 June 1999

Introduction

The freeware landscape generator Terragen is capable of producing very realistic images, and I wondered how easy it would be to import these into a Genesis3D application. I was quite impressed with the results, and how quickly it was possible to generate images, so this page documents how I accomplished this.

The map file these were taken from is here.

Creating the Landscape.

This isn't a tutorial in Terragen. However, a few things worth noting:

• Try to make the centre of the terrain lower. This means that all of the terrain should cover the sky, and not leave the "black holes" that can appear from time to time when the horizon doesn't meet the sky
• Take plenty of time - Terragen doesn't save yet, so you'll have to do everything in one go!

Setting up the Camera

This is very important, especially the zoom function. Without these set correctly the corners of the skybox don't meet.

• Make sure that in the Camera Settings the Zoom is set to 1 (not 1.414 as by default).
• Set the Image Size to a suitable value (I used 256x256).
• Turn off the Camera check boxes that say "fixed height above terrain".
• Set both Z values to be the same.
• Set the camera X and Y position to 128.

The values for the camera are:

Render each sky side then remember to save the file. Terragen saves directly from the screen at the moment, so the greater the colour depth your display is set to, the better.

Using the Skies

Genesis requires the colours to be in 8 bit palletized form, so use your favourite paint program to convert them. Convert to 255 colours (not 256) otherwise you will get strange artefacts in your backgrounds. I usually use IrfanView, but it produces lines down the side of the image, so these were done with Microsoft Photo Editor. I'm not very happy with the results, and will try some others later.

Drop them into your .txl file using the Genesis utility TPack. They are now ready to be used in your level.