Fantasy Skybox Free Download

[Alix Stocking]

FinalFantasy as a franchise is marked by a deep commitment to showing you something new and amazing on your screen. In the original Final Fantasy VII from 1998, that goal was helped along by detailed pre-rendered backgrounds and seamless transitions from video to gameplay. The newly-released Final Fantasy VII Remake is also a bombastic spectacle that pulls from the same bag of tricks, updated for a new era of hardware and stylistic expectations.

Mostly, these backgrounds (I suppose you would call them skyboxes, or maybe cityboxes given that there's not much sky going on) convey a sense of scale and detail that you simply don't see in most video games. It's awesome. But after a moment, your eyes start to notice something else you don't usually see: the vistas look noticeably flat and low-resolution next to the characters and foreground. Imagine if, in Grand Theft Auto V, you looked out from a hilltop and it wasn't just the sky that was pre-rendered in exquisite detail against simple 3D skyscraper meshes, but the buildings, people, cars, everything, all drawn in dense, frantic detail, but with a light vaseline smear.

It is certainly a bold artistic choice, and mostly it works, but blown up on a TV screen it can look downright odd . Squint, though, and the illusion comes back. Let me show you what I mean, as best I can through images on a webpage:

Two-thirds of my way through the game, I became moderately obsessed by the question of how these cityboxes, which are so key to the game's overall visual effect, could also be so flawed in such a high-stakes production. And so to find out more, I called up Mike Snight, a games artist and developer who has worked on titles such as Bioshock: Infinite.

Snight informed me on how skyboxes are done today: Generally, they're a dome over the game world that's mapped with a very high-resolution texture of, typically, the sky (perhaps a real photo or a matte painting), with some added tricks to ensure it looks believable from the player perspective. "Skyboxes get a lot of attention from game developers because they take up so much screen real estate," Snight said.

"That doesn't surprise me. Usually that's super cheap from a performance aspect," he said. "One thing to remember, too, is the type of the game. I know you're going to run up and look at the skybox but there's a lot of battle sequences and action, and a lot of times they won't take the time to do that if they're focusing more on the character interactions and the foreground art for where the characters are walking around."

Along with Final Fantasy VII Remake, this season of pandemic has seen me playing a lot of Call of Duty: Warzone. The world of Call of Duty is visually boring and dead, but all rendered in extremely high resolution. Low detail, high fidelity. Final Fantasy VII Remake is exactly the opposite: high detail, low fidelity. It's pointless to compare the two games except to show that they represent different philosophies: hard-nosed realism in games versus, well, fantasy. You could also call it artistry, or craft.

I'm still not sure of the exact reason why Midgar's cityboxes look low-res, nor if it can or will be fixed with a patch or a PC release, but I do know that they represent a risky decision that balanced resources against vision.

Fantasy Skybox contains 34 high-quality skyboxes. There are hand-painted textures for sun/sunless and moon/moonless. Demo scenes let you navigate through all skyboxes to find which one is the best for your game.

This is a paid asset, but now you can download Fantasy Skybox for FREE, Please keep in mind this package is provided only for learning purposes or to be able to test before buying the product, NOT FOR COMMERCIAL PURPOSES.

Fantasy Skybox contains 34 high-quality skybox. There are hand-painted textures for sun/sunless and moon/moonless. Demo scenes let you navigate through all skyboxes to find which one is the best for your game.

One of the things I really wanted to do with this game was a have a really cool night and day cycle. I've worked on them before, and I know the basics (slowly fade in a night overlay to get towards night, with ambient lighting making "holes" in the overlay, and then fade it out when it gets towards day), but I also wanted to have some other features, since this would be a platformer. And really, this is the first true platformer I've ever worked on. Until this game I've mostly done overhead style games, like zelda and final fantasy, etc. I decided I really wanted to push my skills with this one and learn new things, hence making a platformer.

I'm really glad I did. So many cool things I figured out when making this game, and it def challenged me in the sprite making department. I had to get out of my comfort zones, and that was a good thing. So a few of things I knew I wanted to do with this game-

I wanted multiple parallax scrolling layers, both in the foreground and the background. I did some simple math so that I could specify how close the layer is to the main game camera and how far away, and that would change the speed as well as tinty and slightly blur the background. Farther away, move slower and slower (and tint towards light blue and slightly blur). Closer to the camera, no blur or tint, and move faster than the main camera.

This worked out excellently. One of these days, if I have some time, I'll add some images showing you exactly how this worked. I also decided I wanted scrolling clouds far in the distance. I know for these, the best effect would be to have them not move with the camera, but instead on their own. Like how the sun in the distance seems to stay in the same part of the sky. So I took my basic cloud animation I made about 6 years ago, and layered it up so it was four layers of clouds, each cloud moving at it's own speed, and then a blue sky behind it. This was basically a skybox, like how it's used in 3d games, but for a 2d platformer.

Then, I decided I wanted weather effects in the game. The usual storm effects would require a cloudy overhead, so I added a layer of clouds that would fade in behind the normal clouds (and obscuring the blue sky), and would fade out when the storm was over. Slowly tint the world a dark blue as the clouds rolled in, and then created a simple rain particle effect. I drew a rain drop animation, and then had it randomly appear on the screen at different places, and the heavier the storm, the more rain particles. A simple idea, but it works well. I didn't use Love2d's in system particle engine for this, it seemed like an overkill. A pretty simple randomized place rain and slowly remove rain worked wonders.

Then I decided I needed a fog effect, too. I decided to do something interesting, since this was a platformer. I took my cloud graphics, made them a darker bluish grey, and then stacked them and scrolled them slowly over the foreground. It looked like fog rolling in, and was fantastic. I don't think I'ver ever seen a game use a fog effect like this before, and I really loved how it looked.

Now to return to the night and day cycle. I wanted stars to slowly appear in the sky, so I did a basic starry sky pixel image the size of the screen. I then placed this behind the sky box, and I had the blue sky slowly fade out when it turned to night, and then slowly faded in the night layer ontop of everything else. This gave the effect of stars slowly appearing in the sky during the evening, and then full out when it turned to night. I'm really happy how this turned out, and probably my favorite effect in the game. It feels beautiful and moving, watching the stars come out at night. Esp if it's a foggy night, and the fog is rolling and the stars are twinkling...

To generate a skybox using Model 3 you should first find and choose a skybox style that uses this model and use the style's id response parameter as a skybox_style_id request parameter in this request - explained in more detail in the Get Skybox Styles section.

The control_image should be an equirectangular image sent across as binary, base64 or absolute URL with a common resolution of 2048x1024 or greater, with an aspect ratio of 2:1 and a max file size of 50MB. Images submitted outside of the aspect ratio of 2:1 will be forced to a 2:1 ratio during processing which could produce undesired image warping.

To generate a skybox using Model 2 you should first find and choose a skybox style that uses this model and use the style's id response parameter as a skybox_style_id request parameter in this request - explained in more detail in the Get Skybox Styles section.

The init_image should be an equirectangular image sent across as binary, base64 or absolute URL with a common resolution of 2048x1024 or greater, with an aspect ratio of 2:1 and a max file size of 50MB. Images submitted outside of the aspect ratio of 2:1 will be forced to a 2:1 ratio during processing which could produce undesired image warping. If no image is submitted as init_image, then the parameter of init_strength defaults to 0.0 and the normal processing will take place.

Example: a value of 0.1 will take the submitted image into consideration for only 10% of the process, and then normal diffusion will begin to add new content based on the prompt provided. A value of 0.75 will use the submitted image for 75% of the process, skipping over most of the diffusion process and yielding an outcome that more closely resembles the original. The maximum allowed value for init_strength is 0.97 which allows for minimum change and near-zero diffusion. Values higher than 0.97 will return an error and the content will not process.

Some submitted images and prompts will produce varied results and thus there is no best value to use when adjusting init_strength. For testing, it is recommended to start with a value of 0.5 for init_strength and observe the outcome - lowering or raising the value for desired diffusion.

If an image is submitted with init_image parameter, yet init_strength is not defined, the result will assume a value of 0.0 and return an output unrelated to the init_image. A user must set a value above 0.0 for init_strength for their init_image to be considered as part of the output content

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