Question about skybox textures

[Diva Dan]

I was preemptively creating and releasing a skybox before I made a map for the 72hr jam coming up. However, The side textures of the skybox Look like This;

Instead of this;

It's like it's shrinking the texture longways, and then doubling it. I know why this system is in place in tf2 or hl2 because you aren't ever supposed to see below the horizon line, but for my map specifically I want to have the bottom half of the skybox visible at all times.

Is there any way to circumvent this?

 

[Auwi]

A lot of stuff you need to edit is going to be in your .vmt files for the sides of the skyboxes, you need to edit the $basetexturetransform string to scale it correctly

"sky"
{

"$hdrbasetexture" "skybox/sky_example_01ft"
"$nofog" "1"
"$ignorez" "1"
"$basetexture" "skybox/sky_example_01ft"
"$basetexturetransform" "center 0 0 scale 1 1 rotate 0 translate 0 0"
"%keywords" "tf"
}

I can also see you have half your skybox texture is just negative space, you can edit out the bottom half of it, but you'll need to change your $basetextureform string to " "$basetexturetransform" "center 0 0 scale 1 2 rotate 0 translate 0 0"" which will change the scale to be correct

In addition if you're going to do that, enable Clamp S and Clamp T for your flags in the .vtf file using VTFedit

 

[Diva Dan]

Thanks a lot, I'll try out the transform options. I think that'll do the trick!

 

[Diva Dan]

Everything went good and well, but for some reason the quality is noticibly lower in my skybox than the game I ripped it from. It seems like the pixel fidelity is much lower and there is a lot of blending involved. Here's a comparison:

Is there a way to keep the pixels sharp?

 

[Pocket]

Did you save as BGR888 instead of DXT1?

 

[Diva Dan]

Nah, I have DXT1 selected.

 

[Dr. Orange]

Try converting it to vtf with Mipmaps and LOD disabled.

 

[Pocket]

Nah, I have DXT1 selected.

Well, that's probably the issue then. Skyboxes are traditionally uncompressed because of how visible the compression artifacts would be.