Nice skies

[jobro]

What program can generate realistic skies?

[myk]

There's one called "Digital camera" that you carry in your hand, which might help.

Most skies are either based on photographs (e.g., Kee Deep in the Dead's sky) or are simply artwork (the first sky in DOOM II).

The easiest way to go would be to pick up a photo or an existing sky drawing (maybe it's already digital, or you have a scanner) and modify it with something like The GIMP, PhotoShop, or Paint Shop.

You can always take a game sky as a base and change it. The advantage here is that it'll probably tile well.

If you use another's work as a base make sure they allow reuse or modification, and give them some credit.

[printz]

Or you can simply try gradient skies. Not only they look realistic, they also tile well vertically (the bottom part looking like a sea). Note that the DOom palette is poor on blue, so don't use it. Try grey or red instead.

[Koko Ricky]

If you've got good Photoshop skills, you can try to use the blending and eraser tools to merge several similar looking skies, if you want somehing large, like a skybox. Just don't go crazy with the clouds; too many clouds makes it look awkward.

[DooMAD]

Vue d'Esprit or Vue d'Esprit 2 are terrain generators and are both quite good for making realistic skies and fairly easy to use. There's been a 3, 4 and 5 since I first started using them, but they look somewhat more complex and also cost several hundred dollars to purchase.

[Tormentor667]

Or try "Terragen", also simple and poewerful :)

[myk]

Tormentor667 said:
Or try "Terragen", also simple and poewerful :)

Yeah, that seems like a more reasonable option, given it's free (for nonprofit) and easily obtainable.

[Negatronica]

Or you can do it the old fashioned way by opening up windows paint and draw it pixel by pixel. Thats how I used to do it a long time ago and it forces you to develop skills that transfer directly to other visual arts as I am now finding out.

[jobro]

I've been trying to pixel down the sky I want, but damn it's so hard when I just got 1/10th sight remaining in my right eye and none in my left! That's why I'm asking.

[printz]

If you talk about Paint, then please could you tell me if it's ever possible to have more than 28 colors at once? Designing skies in Paint doesn't work for me because I constantly have to edit colors and that's easy to do wrong.

[jobro]

Yeah I know it is hard to do stuff wrong. You can load pictures with more than 28 colors tho.

[Joe]

Don't use paint, it's shite.

[insertwackynamehere]

are you guys seriously discussing drawing skies in paint by the pixel?

That reminds me when I was a doom editing noob, I would open DeepSea and try and change the color of stuff, like that blue compwall. I tried making that blue compwall red, pixel by pixel in the default image editor and I got really far (maybe completed it) but it took forever since I was looking at the colors trying to figure out which shade of red was like which shade of blue.

I later learned there were programs which could change an images hue in seconds.

[EarthQuake]

I use photoshop to make my sky, then I copy and paste into MSPaint with a doom texture loaded (so it's already in the correct palette). If the colors don't translate well, I just adjust the hue/brightness and try again. Then to get it to tile, I paste two copies into MSPaint, one offset, the other adjacent to it, so that I can see the "seam", then I copy that back into Photoshop, erase the seam, and paste it again in MSPaint so that I end up with a perfectly tiling sky.

I have to say that I find MSPaint very useful. It's good for translating colors into the Doom palette. I've made perfect-looking tall variations of all the Doom and Doom II skies this way.

[myk]

I have to say that I find MSPaint very useful. It's good for translating colors into the Doom palette. I've made perfect-looking tall variations of all the Doom and Doom II skies this way.

Compared to PhotoShop, that is for photographs and the like. Of the popular image manipulators, Paint Shop (commercial) and The GIMP (free) are the better ones for 256 color stuff, because they let you mess with the palette while adding an array of useful editing features. There may be others as well, maybe specialized for sprites or textures (even Wally is a good choice), but Paint is too limited and PhotoShop is for full color stuff.

[GGG]

Joe said:

Don't use paint, it's shite.

Not if you know how to use it

[myk]

printz said:
Note that the DOom palette is poor on blue, so don't use it. Try grey or red instead.

Depends. The Extremal Doom skies look pretty good. With blue it's probaly best to either use a single shade for a clear day sky (perhaps with some clouds), or maybe darker blues for a moonlit night or the like; something like the sky or the intermission in Equinox.

What brown and red (or orange) have is that they are easy to fit with DOOM's general theme (hellish or polluted), as well as having a decent range of shades.