Self-Developing a MUVE for Research and Educational Innovations - Teaching through Multi-User Virtual Environments - page 459

Figure 7. A sky dome. The left picture shows half of a sphere primitive painted blue, which is used to
simulate the sky of a virtual world. In the right picture the sky dome is transparent to reveal the terrain.

Figure 8. The terrain and sky dome when viewed inside of the game development environment by a
character standing in the middle of the world

sphere. The resulting object is commonly referred
to as a sky dome . Figure 7 depicts a sky dome in
the modeling program, which has been painted a
blue color.
As with viewing the terrain in the modeling
program, viewing the combined sky dome and
terrain in the modeling program is unconvincing.
However, Figure 8 depicts the viewpoint of a
character standing in the middle of the world
looking out towards the horizon.
Step 3. Modeling an Asphalt Jungle. Using
polygon modeling to create greenery like trees

and bushes can get complicated, especially if your
modeling program does not support greenery as
basic primitives. However, one can easily create
what I call an asphalt jungle in any modeling
program. I define an asphalt jungle as a scene
consisting of a cross road, gutters, and a sidewalk.
An asphalt jungle can be easily modified to rep-
resent a neighborhood, a main street, or a down-
town.
To create an asphalt jungle, you first take the
plane representing your terrain and use the cutting
technique to create edges that represent the cross