Hello fellow game designers. I’m fairly new with game design and unreal and I’m trying to better my skills in environment design. I’ve always wondered how all these AAA games create these vast open worlds that blend with the background which makes it seem to go on forever or have large distant structures or objects in the distance that aren’t actually there. I take a lot of influence from Destiny 2 and wonder how they create these amazing back grounds. How do they do this? Is it painted in a custom sky box? Or is it on planes? I tried looking up tutorials but all I could find were custom space themed skyboxes which I’m not trying to do. I’m creating a lave themed cavern environment and want to create a background to make the player feel like their in this massive underground cave. ant comments or suggestions are greatly appreciated.
In general, it’s often a combination between very low resolution “boxes with windows on them” (for skyscrapers and such) and painted (or rendered) sky boxes. Or, distant mountains or similar, depending on your environment.
In general, a sky box “should” be centered on the camera and move (but not rotate) with it in the world, because it’s “infinitely far away,” but in Unreal, it’s actually easier to just make a very large sphere, flip the normals inside out, and stick it around the world. Just make sure you turn off collision!
You can also generate the background procedurally, which is helpful for “skies” more than “geometry.” The BP_SkySphere that comes with some of the sample / starter content, is a good spot to start looking, if you want to go that way.