This illustrated tutorial will help you create sky box textures using Bryce 6.x from DAZ Productions.

This will probably work in past versions of Bryce also but be warned that the method may be different as the UI has changed from v5 to v6.

Intro

Bryce is an easy to use but powerful 3D environment creation tool originally created by Meta-creations but was obtained and is being constantly updated with content by DAZ Productions.

Bryce comes with an ample set of pre-built skies to choose from and each preset can be fully customized.

Bryce can be checked out from the DAZ Productions website.

Let's get to it!

This is not a tutorial on Bryce but it will show you step by step how to make the Sky in Bryce and prep it for export to use inside Blade3D.

Blade uses a cube method to render its skies. Each Sky Cube is 6 sided consisting of North, South, East, West, Top (looking straight up), and Bottom (what probably will lay under your terrain).

Fire up Bryce and click File > New



Document Setup

There are some things you need to alter here. The primary thing you should worry about here is what size you want the resulting texture blocks to be. I typically use 1024x1024 (sometimes 2048x2048). The larger the size, the more memory it consumes however smaller images result in loss of quality. Note: The setup above only says 512x512 for screen shot space reasons.

There are 2 more things you must make sure are correct.

• Document Aspect Ratio should always be 1
• Leave Constrain Proportions on

Click the check mark when you are happy with your setup.



Always delete the ground!

Before doing anything, select the ground plane (the only object in the initial scene) and press the Delete key.



Welcome to the Sky Lab

The Sky Lab in Bryce may seem confusing to the newcomer but for Blade and the purposes of sky boxes, there are only a couple things you need to do here.

• Important! Make sure Link Sun to View is OFF
• Sun/Moon Visible will be active by default. It's generally best to turn it off or the scene will render with over exposure of light.

Click the check mark to exit the Sky Lab.



Initial Camera Settings

This is important to remember.

When making Sky Boxes, ONLY use the Trackball to make camera adjustments for direction. The Trackball is the large ball on the left/center with the 4 arrows pointing N,S,E,W. Note: If you have trouble finding it, hover your mouse over the controls and it will say Camera TrackBall in a tool tip when you got it.

Do NOT directly click and manipulate the scene using the Trackball, instead Double Click it to bring up the Camera and 2D Projection dialog.

Change FOV (Field of View) to 112.5 and scale to 100, if it isn't already, and click the Check mark. You should only have to do this part once.



Choose your sky

Next, pick a sky from the large presets list. For the sake of this tutorial, I chose something generic. Monday Sky.

Click the Check mark to close and apply the Preset to the open scene.

Rendering and Finishing Up

For each of the 6 angles, double click the TrackBall control and enter the values from the table below followed by a Render per each direction. Two things to keep in mind.

• Keep Origin in the Camera dialog locked for each stage
• Leave Position Unaltered

The only thing we are working with is Rotate.

Note: For how to render, see the section below the table.

Rotate	X	Y	Z
East	0	90	0
West	0	270	0
North	0	0	0
South	0	180	0
Top	270	180	0
Bottom	90	0	0

Rendering Info

After each stage following the instructions above, click File > Render To Disk, confirm the Output size (it will be what you entered initially when the scene was made) enter a filename and click the Check mark to Render it.

Note: Make sure the render is set to "Perspective Projection" and not "VR 360 Panoramic" as it could cause inconsistent results.

Depending on your computer speed and the size you chose in the beginning of this tutorial, it could take 10 seconds or 5 minutes per render.

You can select any Image format that Blade3D can recognize. I chose PSD as Photoshop is my editor of choice. BMP format will work fine also. Blade will take care of compressing the image down to DX1 VTF format which will decrease the file size significantly.

Closing Hints

Naming conventions are the most important thing to keep in the back of your mind in game development. I usually name my files according to the sky type, followed by the direction. So if my scene is on an alien world, colored towards blue, and the current render is the East block, I would name my file sky_alienblue_east.psd, and then sky_alienblue_west.psd.. and so on.

On a final note, there is a bug within either Blade or Bryce that will sometimes orient the Top render incorrectly. I found flipping it inside the Blade Sky Box property editor causes some problems. If you have an improper orientation of the Top render inside Blade, simply open it up in an image editor (Photoshop for example) and rotate it counter clockwise until the top lines up seamlessly with the rest of the sky box inside Blade.

Thanks for reading!