[andrewmac]

In addition to the Skybox I've now expanded the Sky plugin to include ScatterSky. I know that was something mentioned in the feedback for the last release so I wanted to get something in the works. It's not quite finished yet but here is a preview of it:

[andrewmac]

More screenshots:

[MilkywayM16]

Does this use the same "sky blanket" method that t3d uses?

[andrewmac]

@

MilkywayM16 : could you elaborate? I'm not sure what you mean by "sky blanket".

[MilkywayM16]

Haha my bad, I mean the single curved sky plane that t3d uses in the scatter sky, as opposed to a normal hemisphere.

[andrewmac]

@

MilkywayM16 : the sky is rendered as a full screen triangle like postfx. It's a pretty common trick that avoids rendering a cube surrounding the scene. So far it's looked fine to me but if there's some advantage or difference to rendering the sky in different shapes I can add that.

[MilkywayM16]

That's really interesting! I just did some reading up on the full screen triangle method of post processing. Currently T3D generates a curved plane mesh in the engine and then renders the sky to the mesh. I'm not sure what method is "best" since they all probably have caveats. Why did you choose to take this approach over rendering the sky to a mesh, such as a hemisphere or a plane?

[andrewmac]

@

MilkywayM16 : The most common input for skys is a cubemap. When you sample a cubemap you sample it with a direction. As far as I can tell it shouldn't matter what shape you use you'll always end up calculating a direction based on which way you're looking and use that to sample the cubemap. So, whether you render a cube or render a triangle that covers the screen the math nets you a direction to sample from based on the way you're looking. As far as I can tell the shape shouldn't matter. At least not in skybox vs triangle. I just went this way because I already have an efficient function to render a full screen triangle that I use for post processing. It's possible the other way may be slightly faster because you can do a few more calculations in the vertex shader instead of pixel shader but I'll wait for the sky to show up in a profiler before I worry about that.