How did Epic generated its sky domes for Kite?

Hi everyone,

The sky domes textures in the Kite demo really look amazing. Do you have an idea how Epic did their sky dome textures? Did they use Vue?

Thanks,

Yes the sky textures were made using Vue. There were a dozen or so and for each shot the skydome texture was swapped and rotated a bit for the best composition. An artist by the name of In-Young Yang did the Vue renders.

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Thanks! I did try some rendering, they don’t look as good unfortunately.

Getting good results from sky rendering programs does take patience. I myself admit to tinkering with it and never quite getting there. The key can be the patience to make subtle tweaks since it is so easy for certain settings to go too far. Start by making alterations to the existing demo content since many of the sky presets do not need much more than cloud placement tweaks to get realistic results.

A pity there’s no atmosphere online library for Vue. Vue is really good, there’s just a problem with the grain. Do you know perhaps how to remove grainy effect?

There is, it’s called ā€œcornicopa3dā€ (http://www.cornucopia3d.com) and is a subsidiary of e-on software, so pretty much everything on that site is geared towards Vue :slight_smile: They just haven’t made a ā€œbrowserā€ for it inside Vue yet, but I’m sure it’ll come in the future :wink:

102 atmospheres available: http://www.cornucopia3d.com/store.php?first=1&sel_dir=Atmospheres&level=0&sel_type=Atmospheres

As for the ā€œgrainā€, is a more in-depth thing to answer (and a variable problem)…

Grain (noise) is caused by quite a few different things, and rendering skies made in Vue without noise is a time consuming process, not so much in the creation time, but in the rendering time. The hard and fast rule is, the better your computer is, the faster you can render better quality skies. Vue is a RAM hog, and will eat as much RAM as she can get… CPU power is also a major aspect of rendering speed, and, if you are lucky enough to have an expensive GPU or 3, you can get a lot more out of rendering if you utilise tech like OpenGL/CL etc.

Keep an eye out on my wiki profile for more Vue related stuff, as I plan on writing a guide in the near future that will be for rendering skyboxes and skydomes with as little hassle as possible.

Skyboxes are a little more advanced, and creating 6 seamless inner faces to a box isn’t as easy as the end result makes it look. There are several tricks to employ to create the perfect skybox, but for skydomes it’s not as difficult and generally the setup time isn’t even worth mentioning (can be done almost completely in Render options instead of using some in-scene camera trickery to create a skybox lol)

Hope this helps :wink:

That was exactly what I was looking for thank you very much! How do you enable OpenCL on Vue xStream? I have a GTX 970 I assume it would perform than my i5 4590.

No problem mate.

And as far as CL goes, it’s not fully supported in the way I wrote, I should of been clearer, apologies for that.

Basically I meant you should use an nVidia GPU (which you already have) which have a much better relationship with Vue than AMD cards do, even with 1:1 specs, and afaik this is due to the relationship of CUDA/CL inside the NV kernel (happy to be corrected on this)

Anyway, there are a few good resources out there for learning about the best ways to render scenes in Vue, but remember that most of the information you will find is concerning *entire *Vue scenes and/or animations so you will have to retro-fit that info to suit the needs of game design, specifically sky creation/exportation for games. (Another reason I’ll be writing an in-depth tutorial on how to do this for both skyboxes and skydomes, including best Rendering settings to avoid noise etc)

Have a peek over on their Wiki to get a breakdown of the Rendering options in Full http://www.e-onsoftware.com/wiki/Vue/index.php/Documentation/Building_Scenes/Rendering

But as I mentioned before, that is all written to explain the full rendering options and is geared towards you rendering entire scenes, which is not exactly related to UE4.

Most, if not ALL of you game-related renders will be done in ā€œCustomā€ mode, as the presets again are all for entire scenes and waste a lot of CPU/GPU and RAM resources rendering things you don’t need.

The option of ā€œOpenGLā€ in the Rendering settings in Vue is meant for quick and dirty rendering (think of a quality somewhere between ā€œpreviewā€ and ā€œfinalā€ but with sometimes] the speed of preview 2x-10x)

A few months ago CGC posted this E-on ships Vue Infinite 2015 and Vue xStream 2015 | CG Channel

Notable quotes from that article;

Saving to get my upgrade copy as we speak :wink:

Wow. Nice to know. My project is currently non-commercial (and in concept stage, see signature if curious :)) so Vue 2015 Pioneer could work well, nice skies there on the Cornucopia store.

Had a peek earlier today (the vid too)… looks pretty awesome man I must say!.. Anything sci-fi + video game = has my attention :wink:

I personally haven’t tried Pioneer yet but it seems like the watermarking is only on Scene renders, unfortunately in the case of making Skies, that could be an issue. But the RenderUp pack is only about 70 bucks and removes the watermark + adds the full rendering ability of the $1400 version of Vue right into Pioneer for 500% less cost lol. xStream is really only worth getting if you want to use Vue as a plugin with other CAD software, which is the reason I bought it in the first place years ago, haven’t had much use for the ā€˜xStream’ side of things for a while now, but always good to have the Vue renderer handy when I don’t want to wrestle with Maya or Max’s internal renderers (I honestly prefer Vue over both of them by a long shot).

I also love how easy it is to slap a quick [camera] animation together in Vue, their animation *wizard *lives up to it’s name :smiley:

Ah, RenderUp… thanks for the info!

Have you considered Nvidia IRay? Daz3D comes with it out-of-the-box, and it’s quite impressive.