Introduction
This is the final part in this tutorial, we have a fully functional track finished but now it’s time to add a few final touches that will hopefully add some realism. Here you will learn how to add lighting, a sky dome. and game logic for trying it out.
Adding a sky dome
A sky dome for a track is obviously essential, and it’s not too hard to create either. You just need to worry about getting hold of the right textures. Again, I have included a couple of resources at the bottom of the page with a selection of different skies that could be used.
First of all you need to switch to top view (’Numpad 7′). Then, move your cursor roughly to where you want the dome to appear (at the center of the track), and press ‘SPACE > Add > Mesh > Icosphere’. An icosphere is probably the best to use in this situation, you’ll know what I mean if you try using a UV Sphere.
Now what we need to to is cut the sphere in half, so switch to front view (’Numpad 1′), enter edit mode (’TAB’) and preferably switch to orthographic mode (’Numpad 5′). Next, press ‘Z’ twice, this will enter you into wireframe mode, which is useful for selecting behind vertices, then bring up the selection tool by pressing ‘B’ once. What you need to do now is drag a box around the bottom vertices and release to select them like so:
Obviously you now need to erase them for the dome shape to appear - press ‘DELETE’ then select ‘Erase - Vertices’. The sphere is now in dome form. Finally position and scale it appropriately, it needs to be very large in comparison to the track.
Now that the dome is in position and ready for texturing, we move straight into face mode. The first thing that you will notice is that the ‘normals’ are facing the wrong way (outwards). The way the normals face depends on which side the texture appears - if you zoom into the track the sky dome. appears transparent from inside. To fix this, enter edit mode (’TAB’) and then select every face (’A'). What you need to do now is press ‘W’ to bring up the ’special’ menu . This contains the tool we need to use, so press ‘Specials - Flip Normals’ - the problem has now been fixed, enter face/object mode and zoom into the track to see what has happened. The sky is white!
Adding a texture to the sky dome. is similar to what we talked about in the last section, but with a slight twist. Again, enter face mode, split the screen and open the UV/Image Editor - this time though, make sure you are in front view (’Numpad 1′). Select all the faces (’A') and then open up the sky texture you wish to use (’Image > Open…’).
The twist is, that we need to use a different UV calculation, it looks a bit strange with the default setting. What we need is a continuous ‘wrap’. Make sure all of the faces are still selected and press ‘U’, then press ‘UV Calculation - Cylinder’. Yes, it does look even worse now, but what you need to do is scale down the texture ‘net’ so that it fits around the dome.
Drag the UV window further out so you have more room and then zoom out via either the scroll wheel or ‘Ctrl+MMB’ until you have a full view of the net. Then select the entire thing (’A') and scale it down vertically so press ‘S’ and then ‘Y’ and drag. It scales it down to the center, so just move it down to the texture by pressing ‘G’ and then ‘Y’ and moving your mouse. Zoom back in and try to scale it until it perfectly fits the box:
As you can see, the net is slightly wider than the texture, you need to do this due to the nature of the shape of the sphere, if you don’t then an ugly overlapping will form:
Hopefully you should now have your sky completed, take a look around - it really gives the track a boost in realism.
Lighting
Lighting isn’t too difficult in this situation, we are going to use a dynamic method that projects the sunlight directly onto the texture.
First off we need to actually add a source of light, namely the sun. Make sure the default ‘lamp’ setup is deleted then position the cursor around to where you want to place your sun. Press ‘SPACE’ to bring up the shortcut menu then go to ‘Add > Lamp > Sun’. You should see this element appear:
A couple of changes need to be applied to the sun’s properties in order for better results, and because I have chosen a ‘day’ track I need the energy of the light to be increased. I have used ‘1.200′ and enabled the ‘No Specular’ button (this stops the ground reflecting the sun):
Now we need to enable the track textures to allow lighting. To do this you simply switch to face mode (’F'), select every face (or the ones you wish to support lighting), go to the ‘editing’ buttons window and under ‘Texture face’ press the ‘Light’ button then ‘Copy DrawMode’. Copy DrawMode copies the setting across all of the faces you have selected.
You should notice that shading has been applied to your track. To change the source direction rotate the sun (along the Z axis) and the shading direction changes.
Final result
So, after all of that you’re probably eager to know what my track now looks like. First of all you should know that my poly count is around 950 faces which is extremely low and should run smoothly on most low-spec machines.
The shots below are all taken with MIP Mapping disabled. You can access the option by pulling down the ‘User Preferences’ bar, selecting ‘System & OpenGL’ then disabling the ‘MIP Mapping’ button. I won’t go into detail, but you’ll know what I mean when I say it improves realism for still shots. Take a look:
Conclusion
Not bad is it? I think considering the poly count and simplicity it looks quite effective. With further detail and textures it could look even better, but as far as this tutorial goes I’ll leave it at that for now. In the very final part of this tutorial I will explain the process of setting up your own track testing engine.
Sky textures
A small collection of free rendered sky maps for you to use with your track:
