Simulating a far view of a city

Abdullah

I've searched for this technique where you mimic a view of a very far city just like the one in Samaritan demo but with no luck. I have though of sky-box but i didn't try that. If it is not a sky box then what is it called?

the only try i did was creating cylindrical a very large one and added a material with random far buildings image but it looked horrible and not really realistic.

Spiffy664

it might be a billboarded texture but I cant say for sure that its not modeled out at all...

This raises the question, does epic / unreal team ever talk about how their fancy engine demos are made? I'm sure a quick google

haiddasalami

I would say a mixture of geo buildings and image planes in far off distance. height fog should help it blend better. I'm pretty sure that's a dome texture for the Samaritan demo.

gsokol

That image of the dome in the back looks like its just an image plane really.

You can have some low res models in the background, image planes, or details in a skybox....any of those things would work.

Your not showing any images of what you have tried, so we don't know why it looks bad. Makes it hard for us to help you.

Desaturation helps convey depth...so yea fog should help if you set it up right. Also maybe subtle dof as well.

respawnrt

Lol that cilindrical building's perspective is verry off eye level and all.

Abdullah

what i did was creating one cylinder in max with big radius, deleted its caps then inverted its normal to face inward then applied a material to it. it wasnt cylinderical buildings respawnrt

so what you guys suggest is make it a dome texture, blend it with fog. i'll give that a try and see if it would turn up nicer.

thanks for the info

Money

Yes, do a dome texture and in front of it add some low poly buildings, fog is great for giving it more natural blend. In Mass Effect they had nice examples of it, like this Illuim pic.




I think this is the texture they used for it.

Minato

Oh ME how i miss thee...anyways,yes i'm willing to bet that's just a texture there in Samaritan demo,probably an hdri...hmm,can we do image based lighting in udk?,i mean in that scale...

wes.sau

Yeah they show the samaritan skydome texture in UDK documentation (about middle of the page)

http://udn.epicgames.com/Three/ImageBasedReflections.html

but note the dome of the capital building isn't in the texture, but is probably a billboard sprite put behind the end of the street in the samaritan scene.

leleuxart

For some particular scenes, could you have models placed in UDK and then take a screenshot, edit it, then apply it to the cylindrical mesh? I'm working on a jungle environment and I figured I'd model out some of the background landscape and place my meshes to fill it up a bit, then screenshot it.

HAWK12HT

The city here is just a picture applied to Sphere squashed, you can do same in UDK with sphere mesh large enough to encompass your whole scene (even numbers for the win like 256x256 or 1024x1024) just unwrap that sphere and apply it as emmit map with very low intensity.

It will give the feeling of light hitting the atmosphere in a far off and ofcourse use Fog to mimic horizon line and polution .

sprunghunt

usually a combination of models and a background texture is how this is done.

But don't forget with this kind of thing you can use fake perspective to limit how much you actually have to draw. If you have your buildings scaled down as they recede from the player then you give the impression of perspective without the same draw distance.