How to create a Space Skybox?

Hello there!

I’m trying to create a Starbox, but so far the results are pretty sad :frowning: What I’m basically trying to achieve is this exactly: - YouTube

Now in ATI CubeMapGen everything looks gorgeous, but when I followed a tutorial from FRAGGED (Unreal Engine 4 Tutorial: Skybox Creation !OUTDATED! - YouTube , which is basically this tutorial in a video form), the end result looked unbelievably ugly. This is a 384Mb, 4096 cubemap in UE4 compared to 1024 one in CubeMapGen: http://i.imgur.com/VFccnmY.jpg

Why is it so unbelievably hard to make such a simple thing as a Skybox? You would think that in an engine that’s as advanced as UE4 you just load the cubemap and it would look perfect, but no.

Is there any other method that will allow me to make a high quality Star Skybox?

Thanks!

Hey cooreets… you could try to open your skybox texture by double clicking and go to Level of Detail → LOD Group and set it to “Skybox” … just a suggestion. I am fairly new to UE4 aswell

Hey Braindrain85,

Thanks for the tip, but unfortunately that didn’t make no difference whatsoever :frowning:

Sorry to hear that :frowning: then I have no clue

You probably want to use this: Spacescape

That can create space skyboxes to your liking I hope :slight_smile:

Best of luck/
Mike

But I did use it and it looked awesome, until I’ve imported it to UE4

I see, but if you loose fidelity, it is becomes more tricky. Because we don’t know how you imported it, what settings you use, and how large the textures you created actually are… etc…

But that’s my question exactly: how do you import it, what settengs do you use and how large the texture must be for everything to look awesome?

Hey cooreets, I got the .DDS files you sent to me on YouTube and it’s probably best to keep the discussion here for any future reference.

So for my SkyBox I used a .DDS file exported using the Nvidia plugin and the texture size was 4096x4096

It looks like you have contrast issues which can be fixed from inside UE4 by opening the .DDS file in your content browser.
You’ll have settings that you can adjust if your texture is too contrasted/bright etc.

I suggest tweaking with these values to get your skybox working correctly (Maybe start with vibrance & brightness)

Hope this helps.

Hey FRAG,

Your scene looks very good - can you share it here please? Do you have any idea why my cubemap looked so “blown up”?

Thank you!

Well as I stated in my answer, you should look at tweaking the settings of the .DDS in your content browser by double clicking it.

The scene I posted is a UT4 map I’m working on but if you’re still having issues after my suggestion then I’ll release part of the scene and assets here for you and anyone else to look at.

Ok, nevermind about the colors for now, do you have any idea why it looks as if it was out of focus? It has to be really sharp, I can’t find any settings that will allow me to control that.

It would be really cool if you’d release a part of your scene too :slight_smile:

Hmm, not that I’ve looked into it myself but I would guess image compression may be the culprit here. I know in the old UDK you could separate the channels (as 8 bit greyscales per channel) and them combine them to get around that particular issue. Maybe you can in UE4 too, but I haven’t tried that myself :slight_smile: Oh, and don’t forget to flip the images around. Spacescape is geared towards Ogre 3D I believe.

Ok, I figured out what the problem was. So in Level Of Detail I enabled Mip Gen Settings-> NoMipmaps for the texture to look sharp. Played with adjustments a bit and disabled automatic eye adaptation. Looks like this:

Still not what originally hoped for, but close. That DXT compression sucks, is there absolutely no way around it?

Make sure that the texture your effect is sampling was successfully imported in the editor.
Right click → Edit or simply double click on your texture asset.
Under the Level of Detail category: change the LOD Group to ColorLookupTable
This will disable the texture’s mipmapping and compression, fallbacking to a pixel format we handle.
Currently, the only pixel format we handle is B8G8R8A8.