The Tutorial

This is my Research Task submission for BENV2423. In this tutorial you will learn how to create a custom sky box, and in this example I am making an entirely white environment. In this tutorial I also explore some of the Time of Day settings which affects the skybox and may give you the results you want for your environment.

PLEASE VIEW IN HD!


TUTORIAL SUBJECT (500 Words):

With technology changing and improving every day, there are plenty of definite gaps in the so-called ‘body of knowledge’ that will no doubt be eventually filled as users become more familiar with the software available to them and begin to find limitations and possibilities that the software presents.

However, because these updates and new versions come out so regularly, there is no way even a single person could know how to use every single tool in a program; there are updated versions so regularly that by the time a person was to understand how to use every tool and know every possibility that the software offers there would already be a new version out that users would have questions about how to use.

This is why there is a great need for users themselves to create tutorials (which had indeed been recognised on sites such as youtube) for things they have figured out about the software. It is much more helpful when users create tutorials because they know more than anyone what other users will be wanting to do with the software, much more than buying a book about the program or typing a question into the ‘help’ menu. This is particularly true with software like the Crysis Wars Sandbox 2 Editor that we have been working with this year.

When working with Sandbox this semester I found a few gaps but the thing I found most difficult and most interesting was how to make a custom skybox and a completely white environment; mostly because I had to deal with several different aspects of the editor to achieve this goal and the end result was very rewarding and interesting to walk around in.

I only found one tutorial on how to make a custom skybox on the internet at this website: http://www.incrysis.com/forums/viewtopic.php?id=25675, but it was not all that helpful as it also included downloading 2 or 3 extra programs or plugins to get the right file type, etc. But I figured out that because it is possible to export objects from Sketchup with its textures, that plugin must create the .dds file that Sandbox needs to recognise it as a texture. Then I managed to figure out my own simpler process for creating this file. Then because this was not supposed to be a normal-looking sky and I did not want a horizon line I had to figure out how to get rid of it using the Time of Day settings menu, and I still don’t know how to stop it from going to the default setting each time I open up the environment.

The tutorial I created is easy to understand, though made for intermediate to advanced users because of the work in the file path of the Cysis Wars folder, but because I explained things clearly and relatively slowly I think any type of user would have no trouble with it.