Tonight I wanted to spend some time getting a skybox created for this map and then work on getting the bulk of the windows created. I have to say, mission successful!!

I found a tutorial on the web giving a very basic rundown on creating a skybox. Once I had the in initial skybox created I spent about an hour and a half digging for a good texture to use. It's pretty hard to find a non-dark, non-moon, non-mountainous horizon texture in the default texture packs. However, I did find a pretty good one in the Sky.utx file that gave me a blue sky with clouds. At some point I plan to take my camera to work with me and snap some of my own horizon pictures to use in the skybox. After all, if someone looks out the front door, they MUST see the muffler man! :-)

While creating the skybox, I ran in to a few issues with lighting. By default, a skybox produces no light. Back asswards, I know. So I started by adding a single sunlight actor to the skybox. After dinking with it for a bit I came to realize that to get a realistic amount of sunlight into the building, I would need more than one sunlight actor. In order to maintain a “sun is on the south side of the building” appearance, I left the main sunlight actor maxed out at a brightness of 255, then added additional sunlight actors on the other 3 sides of the skybox, but turned them down to about 128. This provided the additional light I wanted, however, the middle of the building was still very dark, unlike the building in real life. I did a bit more research and found the ZoneLight setting.in the Level properties. I set this to 64 and BAM! We's gots lights! So much so that I needed to cut the brightness of the sunlight actors in my skybox in half. The one drawback to this is that now my compile times for the map have almost doubled. Makes sense though when you consider the fact that UnrealEd is now rendering many more lights and shadows that it was with this setting turned off.

In the end I'm happy with what I have. The building now has the appearance of mid morning sunlight coming in to the building. I'll probably tweak it a bit more, but for now, it's good.

Here are a few screenshots of Dub Rivas with the lighting mentioned above:

http://blogbylevi.iveldesigns.com/gallery/image/10.aspx

http://blogbylevi.iveldesigns.com/gallery/image/11.aspx

* Please note that I will no longer be resizing these screen shots. I will only be reducing the quality down to 60%. This will cause some pixelation.