Creating Assets for the Blender Game Engine - Mastering Blender - page 899

Setting Up the World
Now that you've created a character for your game, it's time to create the game environment. This will consist
of a background sky and a maze through which the character will move.
Baking Procedural Textures for a Simple Skybox
To create a sky for games it is necessary to use a skybox , which is an actual Mesh object on which the sky
texture is mapped directly. You can use any sky texture you wish for your skybox; it could be a hand-painted
sky, a photograph, or an image created in a sky and terrain-simulation program. This depends on the look and
atmosphere you want in your game.
Thefollowingexampleshowsyouwhatmightbethesimplestwaytogetapassableskybackgroundbyusing
proceduraltexturesinconjunctionwithBlender'spowerfultexture-bakingfunctionality.Tosetupyourskybox,
follow these steps:
1. Open a fresh Blender session. Just as you did when you created the character in the previous section,
enter Edit mode, select all vertices of the default cube, press the W key, and select Subdivide Smooth to
create a 24-sided polygon.
2. Select the nine vertices that make up the edges shown in Figure 14-43 , forming a cross shape across
the bottom of the mesh. If the edges are hard to see, check this topic's full-color insert for a color print of
this image.
Figure 14-43 Selecting edges for seams on a subdivide-smoothed cube
3. Press Ctrl+E to bring up the Edge Specials menu, and select Mark Seam from that menu.
4. The next step is to create the combination of textures that will later be baked to an image. To do this,
add a material to the cube. Make sure the material is shadeless by selecting the Shadeless option on the
Material tab in the Material properties area. The material needs three textures. First, create the texture