Tutorial #4: SkyBoxes (.UNR not yet available) | Author: Orion | Last Updated: May 25th

Unreal Tutorial #4 SkyBoxes Before you begin, please have your display set to 1024x768 if possible. It is absolutely dreadful, in my opinion, to run UnrealEd at any other resolution. Also, if this seems confusing in any way, feel free to come to Efnet #unrealed and ask me there, please do not email me. I use the nick Orion.

Also, PLEASE read the readme.txt that came with your unreal game and the first two tutorials. They are extremely invaluable, and will help you tremendously.

If you are in a quake/duke3d/doom mindset about skies, please remove yourself from this mindset right now. A sky in unreal is much different. Think of it this way: The ceiling of any room can be used as a television set, and there is a camera way off in space somewhere aimed at a sky. If that sounds confusing, dont fret. You will understand. Let's Proceed.

Step 1

Create your basic square room. Resize it so that it suits you and subtract it. I have found that all of my favorite textures are in the PlayerShp texture file. Now, in the 3d view, right click on the ceiling of your newly created room and bring up it's surface properties. Be sure that you only have the ceiling selected, or it will cause problems later. In the surface properties, click on the Effects tab, and click the checkbox Fake Backdrop. Close the surface properties window.

Step 2

Now move your brush somewhere else, completely unrelated to the room you just constructed. Make the room shorter than the room you just build off to the side, and select a sky texture (there is a nice cloud texture at the bottom of SkyBox). Subtract. You should now have something that looks like this:

Step 3

Now you will add a SkyZoneInfo tag into the room that looks like a sky. This is in "Classes-Info-Zoneinfo-SkyZoneInfo." Right click inside of your skybox, and select Add SkyZoneInfo here.

Step 4

Right click on the ceiling of your skybox and select Surface Properties. In the far right column, click the checkbox that reads U-Pan. Add a playerstart in the first room that you created, some lights in both rooms, rebuild, and run your level.

When you ran your level, were you able to see a "box" of sky, and able to see 3 sides of your skybox? If so, here is how to fix it. Simply delete your skybox and create a much shorter one. Move the lights into it as well as the zoneinfo, and you are set. If that does not fix the problem, you can make your original room a little taller.

Here is what my final product looked like:

What did I just do?

You just used a technique known as a "skybox" to emulate a sky in unreal. The ceiling of your first room acted as a television set, looking through a camera (SkyZoneInfo actor) pointed towards the sky. Now, any other wall that you select a "fake backdrop" on will look through the same camera.

What if I want to use another sky somewhere, with a different texture?

You will have to create a new room directly over the room you want to have a different sky on, and subtract square brushes inbetween to make "windows" to your new sky.