Quake 3 - Cloud Shadows and Layered Clouds.

[Morari]

Upon playing Team Arena I noticed that many of the maps have large shadows moving across the ground in sync with the clouds in the sky. Is this a Team Arena specific feature or a simple shader that could be used in normal Quake 3?

Also, regarding clouds. Would it be possible to place a normal cloud texture/shader beneath the top layer of a skybox? The desired result would be a static landscape along the horizon, but with moving clouds up top.

[obsidian]

TA cloud shadows is just an extra stage on the terrain shader that scrolls in the same direction as the clouds in the skybox. Nothing special about it. It's an extra rendering pass so there is some performance loss, though pretty small on today's hardware.

Second question: yes. Keep in mind that you should keep the number of layers in your sky shaders under 3 (or was it 2) otherwise you may hit a "max_something_something on cloud fill sky" error. If you really want to go fancy, I guess you can always do a portal sky with all sorts of crazy effects.

[Magnus]

Yea. I would love to learn how to make skies and ground shadows like in kineterra1. That was such an awesome map.

Perhaps I should start doing some research.

[seremtan]

layered clouds: you'll need HDRshop, and possibly terragen or at least some big sky pics. there was a tute or at least a how-to about this way back in the day. ydnar made some sexy clampmapped angular mapped skies with a scrolling cloud layer

you can find some sky textures at imageafter: http://www.imageafter.com/ and also here: http://www.mayang.com/textures/index.htm

anyone have the link to that tute?

this is the *only* way you'll get good-looking animated sky in Q3A i'm afraid

edit: i found the archive thread about this and there was a link to a tute by Black Dog about angular-mapping but the link is dead. if anyone saved it, now's the time...

[rgoer]

there was this thread, but I don't have any of the images any more. The text gets the point across though.

[obsidian]

Wooooo.... my old forum icon from before the UBB meltdown, how I missed thee.