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WARNING: This video contains BEAUTIFUL examples of vibrant skies. If you think
you’ll be offended by this sort of content then please do a full 360 and walk away.
A wise man once said that, for a map to be successful, it must be sunny. And Valve
appears to have listened to this advice, since in the current mappool are many maps
with a nice blue sky and sunshine. But the sky can always get bluer, and the sunshine, stronger.
In this video, I’ll be doing exactly that. This all started about 7 years ago. After
finishing work on de_sparity, I was experimenting with the lighting that
I could use for my next map. And I set out to make the most convincing blue sky that I could.
You don’t realise how blue a blue sky is until you stop and stare at it. If we weren’t so used to
it being normal, it would be really strange. The sky isn’t just a blue colour- it’s a blue LIGHT,
shining down in all directions when the weather’s nice! And I really wanted to get
that ‘pop’ into my map. So here is what I achieved, after lots of adjusting and
staring out of the window on a sunny day. Simply looking at this puts me in a bright, sunny mood.
So let’s add it to existing maps in CS:GO and see what they look like!
Here is Mirage, normally. And here it is with MY blue sky. It’s subtle,
but also it isn’t because it’s easy to get carried away with the blue. It’s addictive.
But if you don’t like it, then imagine a setting that’s somewhere between the two or whatever.
There are no half measures in this video. Now a sunny image is about more than just the
sky colour. I’ve also moved the sun’s direction so that it’s facing more sharply downwards,
meaning that shadows are shorter and thus, more of the scene is in the sun.
And I’ve tweaked the lighting, because if the sky’s really blue, then so will the shadows.
So what goes into making an authentic blue sky? First off, the sky is NOT just one block of
colour. It’s one colour directly above us, then it fades into another as it approaches the horizon.
Because that’s where the atmosphere’s thicker, whereas directly above us is where it’s thinnest,
to the point where it’s letting some of space’s darkness through.
WHAT? Space? I hear you cry? How can you see SPACE
through the Earth’s thick, protective atmosphere? Well, wait until it’s night time and you’ll see.
So yeah, the way I make sky is to have a REALLY bright blue colour surrounding the level,
then to use a lighter colour of fog for it to fade into. Since the block around the
level is shaped like this, it’s closest to the player directly above them, and hence,
there’s the least fog there, and therefore, the colour there is darkest. Just like real life!
So it’s all to do with how far the player is from the edge of this blue block.
‘BUT’ I hear you cry. ‘Philip, why didn’t you just use a blue skybox picture instead?’
-good point. I could have done and it would have been a lot easier. But it would have been boring,
as it wouldn’t have been as dynamic as this realtime fog strategy is! Doing it this way
means it’s easily adjustable, too- using the FOGUI command in-game I can easily adjust the shade and
distances of this fog. Hours of endless fun. If I use a negative starting number,
it means that stuff’s already half-foggy even when it’s right next to me. So that’s cool
for a less aggressive blue colour of sky. I can even change the colour of the fog to
whatever I like, and some of these can be quite interesting… if completely unrealistic. Still,
it’s pretty to look at, isn’t it. This is how I got the colour of the
sky for my first CS:GO map, Elysium. SarahB was experimenting with all sorts and it was thanks
to this built-in feature that we settled on a bright orange colour, instead of a more subtle
dark brown one. I strongly suggest playing with this yourself if you’re at all interested.
Let’s take a look at ANOTHER map.
Overpass! This is another map that’s already -supposedly-
quite sunny. But apply God’s Instagram filter to the world and BOOM!
Actually no, I take that back. This IS going too far. There’s blue, there’s bright blue,
and then there’s the sickly sweet artificial blue colouring that you can see here. This isn’t
entirely my fault, this map has some powerful post-processing effects over the top of it which,
if I disable, returns the sky back to a slightly more ‘normal’ colour again. But like I said, I’m
just using this as a demonstration of how far you can go with this technology. And to highlight how
washed out CS:GO’s maps are in the first place. I discovered something very interesting with
Overpass’s sky- it used a unique particle system to generate the clouds. How interesting!
I immediately removed it. But there are places I will be using it elsewhere.
I’ve always felt that Ancient is less friendly looking than Aztec was.
Let’s see what we can do about that! …and this is where I ran into problems
with my technique. My fog technique requires use of the 3D skybox. But Ancient already has
a 3D skybox. No problem, normally there’s enough room for both. BUT NOT HERE. Because
Ancient’s skybox is unique in that it uses the exact same scale as the world itself!
This ruins my technique since there just isn’t enough room for it. Either the map itself is
plunged into fog (which actually looks kind of cool), or the fog drop-off is too abrupt,
or it stretches out far enough to reveal the edges of the blue box. None of these options are ideal.
It’s a bit late for me to suggest new features for the Source engine,
but it would be great if the map could have a sky-fog feature like this one I’ve come up with,
but for it to be separate from the rest of the 3D skybox so that it doesn’t conflict with it,
as it does in Ancient’s case. And I attempted Nuke as well.
Nuke is one of the few maps that I don’t think needs to be any sunnier. But I still took that
as a challenge, and made it bluer any way. But I couldn’t! Anything I tried with my
new technique simply made the map look overcast instead. What’s going on here?!
Well, flying across to the skybox reveals the problem:
the sky has a shadow on it. Or rather: it’s not receiving as much blue lighting from BELOW the map
as it could be, because the ground’s blocking some of it. Things are never easy, are they.
So I re-compiled the map with 20x more ambient illumination and by RAISING THE
HEIGHT OF THE SKY. With these ‘minor’ adjustments, it worked as intended.
So here was Nuke before, and here’s the NEW BLUE NUKE. Just for you.
Making sunny maps sunnier is all well and good, but what if I use my powers
to bring sun to a cloudy map? Office is such an overcast looking level. A
blue sky makes it look really inviting in all… 2 bits of it that are outside.
Monastery’s another cloudy level. Don’t get me wrong- I do like its cloudy, mountainous setting.
It suits it perfectly! In fact, I think making it blue and sunny would ruin it. But I went and
did it any way, and this is what it looked like. Don’t lie- you wish you were here. And not here.
Militia’s a funny one. This was Counter-Strike Source’s sunniest,
most inviting map! Then a few years ago, CS:GO updated it to be cold, dark and snowy.
So I’ve returned it from whence it came, but with a splash more blue. And you know
those particle clouds from Overpass? I added them here, just to see what they looked like.
I really liked how they made the windmill all rickety
and broken for this map… but then I realised it wasn’t meant to be like this,
but was just a result of a bad map decompile. But I think it’s an improvement. Valve, pls break.
Why stop there? Why not try OTHER colours instead? Honestly,
I think for anything other than a blue sky, standard skybox pictures are better.
But at a pinch, this technique can be used to imitate a sunset. Or night time. And so on.
Pioneering a technique like this, I ran into problems. Fog with less than 100% thickness looked
bad. Every skybox has stuff at different heights, meaning the fog’s distances need to be customised
to accommodate for them- this could be bypassed if the sky fog was separate from the rest of the 3D
skybox, as mentioned earlier. And I don’t like the fog accumulation, which looks too abrupt even when
spread over tens of thousands of units. I’d say that’s the main issue here- where it fades between
the colours is too ‘small’ an area, so a custom fog drop-off would be really appreciated. This
is especially needed on a map like Vertigo, where you can view the sky right off into the horizon,
where the fog simply can’t scale to when confined to the dimensions of a Source map’s skybox.
But look at what it brings to the table! Look at how train looks, after the smog has cleared
and the country has gone green.
The cut-off is too abrupt in Cache, given how high above the level the box begins. So while
it isn’t as impressive as it COULD be here… I can still use it to bring back Cache’s greenery.
Look at how NICE Dust2 looks now, set under a confident, blue sky,
with not a hint of dust in sight. The sad thing? I showed this a few videos ago and nobody even
noticed. So… What if I want to change it to a sandstorm? That looks awesome too. I’ve barely
scratched the surface of what I can do with this. If I change the blue base texture to a red,
it opens up yet more possibilities for colour gradients! Don’t tell me you don’t want this. I
don’t think it’s for everyone. But then, a neon AK isn’t for everyone either. But for the people who
like that kind of thing, it can be EVERYTHING. So how about this, Valve- bundle the ability
to customise the sky colour in with your monthly stats subscription, and watch as everybody buys it
just to be able to game with meme-green skies, or to create an inferno in an inferno. If people want
to smurf under a smurf-coloured sky then so be it. There. You’re welcome to use that million-dollar
suggestion right there. I guess you could say… the sky’s the limit.