Mek's Box 'o Skies! - v3, look, up in the sky, more SKIES!

[Mechadon]

Download Box 'O Skies v3 RIGHT HERE! [66mb]

 

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Version 3:

- This adds an additional 407 new skies (again, many are recolors and variants).  Many new base images, foregrounds, and other scraps have been included.  Also check for .xcf files in the scraps folder if you wanna dig around some of the sky layouts.  Lastly, check the animfiresky folder for a set of animated fire skies; these will need to be manually animated using something like ANIMDEFS.

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I figured it was finally time for me to officially release some of my sky textures. Some of them have been posted in random threads over the years, and many others have been released in projects such as Resurgence and THT: Threnody, among others. I've also had random skies lying around that I've made but never used, as well as some sub-par quality stuff that might be useful to someone. So I spent the better part of a day organizing everything and dumping it into a .zip file for you guys to enjoy :D

Currently I have 562* sky textures in the pack. They are all in Doom's palette and cover a few different sizes (most are 1024×240). There are a lot of color variations of the same texture, but there should still be quite a bit to choose from. Some are seamless vertically as well as horizontally (ie. the star skies). In addition I've included some of the base greyscale images, some foreground stuff with .png transparency, and a folder filled with some slightly crappier skies and experiments that I thought might be useful to someone out there. Unfortunately I don't have the base images for most of the skies that I made a few years ago, but I've included what I do have.

(*Note that I haven't tested every single sky, so let me know if one or more of them looks bad or is broken)

All of these skies can be used in any way you see fit! Chop 'em up, recolor them, stick 'em in a stew...do whatever! If you do use them, try and remember to give me some credit, I would appreciate it ;)

I will probably be updating this in the future with new skies and other stuff. What I would like to know from you guys is whether or not I should take the time to plop all of the skies in a wad and make a test map to showcase all of them. It will take a while to do, but I don't mind if its something that would be worthwhile. I think I would also like to dump this on /idgames at some point, though I would want to wait until its more finalized.

Here are some example skies:






If you guys run into any problems, or if you have any requests, just let me know ;). Thanks guys!

Edited September 23, 2019 by Mechadon
Updated pack to version 3

[AD_79]

Wonderful stuff, man. Thanks for sharing this!

[Breezeep]

Oooh, It's really nice to hear that you've compiled some of your skies! You're a great artist, Mek!

[Fonze]

These skies are beautiful Mech; I can't wait to see them pop up in wads all over the place :)

[Devalaous]

That second would totally fit in a TNT wad

[40oz]

Holy fuck 115 mechadon skies?? Hell yes

[dobu gabu maru]

Damn it Mek, stop being such a useful and productive member of the community! Now I have to make a map for each of these gorgeous skies!

[Doomkid]

Gorgeous skies, Mek! 5/5 will steal for future maps

[Benjogami]

Goddamn, nice. And thanks!

[tourniquet]

Awesome.

[LordShadowZ]

Holy cow, these are awesome! Some of these are perfect for the WAD I'm making. Thank you!

[SFoZ911]

Thank you for sharing Mek, those are awesome. I think skies are very important when creating maps, they can help set the atmosphere and can be use to decide the level of natural lighting and the direction it's coming from.

[antares031]

THIS. Definitely one of the best skybox textures I've ever seen. Thanks for sharing these skyboxes. :)

[grommile]

Well. That solved the "what am I going to do for skies in my WAD" problem!

Great stuff. Thank you!

[floatRand]

Thanks a lot for the bunch! I see if I can incorporate them into Disjunction!

Edit: Looking through set, definitely satisfied. Very good job!

[Voros]

Q: why are the skies so wide?

antares031 said:

http://puu.sh/tQEtD/e0c9b4445e.png

I feel like I'm upside down looking at that.

[esselfortium]

Thank you Mechadon!

[scifista42]

Voros said:

Q: why are the skies so wide?

Because, in Doom, width 1024 covers full 360° of the sky view, looking uniquely at any distinct direction the player can look into. Width 512 would cover 180° and be tiled twice for full 360°, looking identically if the player looked north and south. Width 256 would cover 90° and be tiled 4 times for full 360°, looking identically if the player looked north and east and south and west. And so on.

[Voros]

Would it work in vanilla? If so, why hadn't id Software done it before, rather than doing 4 seperate images eg Episode 4?

[esselfortium]

Voros said:

Would it work in vanilla? If so, why hadn't id Software done it before, rather than doing 4 seperate images eg Episode 4?

Vanilla doesn't like reading enormous patches, so the sky ends up covered in tutti-frutti junk pixels if it's imported that way. Splitting a wraparound sky into four 256x128 patches is done to work around that. Modern source ports don't have this problem, so large skies can be imported without that workaround.

E4 doesn't use a wraparound sky, you're thinking of some of Final Doom's skies I think :)

[floatRand]

Spoiler

Thanks a ton for these.

[Tetzlaff]

Are your skies also available as 256x256 or 512x512 skybox textures?

[Gothic Box]

Ooh, these look fantastic. Looks like I'll have to learn how to implement custom skies now, because the vanilla skyboxes are beyond boring after 24 years.

[Scotty]

Awesome stuff - thanks Mechadon.

[Grain of Salt]

esselfortium said:

Modern source ports don't have this problem, so large skies can be imported without that workaround.

Wait, you can really just use a 4 x regular width patch for the sky in prboom-plus instead of messing around with textures? I never knew that.

[antares031]

Voros said:

I feel like I'm upside down looking at that.

In this case, let me help you:



Honestly this one is not bad, far from it. Maybe someone can make it better by adding an extra sky texture at the top. That would be a nice skybox for a floating arena above the clouds.

[Paul977]

Thanks for sharing

[Mechadon]

Wow, thanks so much for all the kind words guys! It is an honor to see how much you guys like my stuff, and seeing it be used in your projects is the best thanks I can get. I'm glad that my countless hours of pixel mining in GIMP over the years will be put to good use :D

By the way, there are some skies that I didn't include that are part of in-progress projects (ie. Vela Pax). Whenever those projects get released, I'll update this pack with them, possibly along with some recolored variants.

Ragnor said:

That second would totally fit in a TNT wad

That sky, as well as the starry sky with Saturn on it, was actually made to be a recreation of the TNT starry sky. The original TNT skies were going to be used in THT: Threnody, so I ended up making my own version to replace it (and the others).

floatRand said:

Thanks a lot for the bunch! I see if I can incorporate them into Disjunction!

Very nice, I'm glad I could be of some help! Your mapset is looking fantastic by the way, sorry I haven't commented on it earlier.

Voros said:

Would it work in vanilla? If so, why hadn't id Software done it before, rather than doing 4 seperate images eg Episode 4?

Essel already answered your question here, so I'll say that if you or anyone else would like to use these in a vanilla mapset, let me know and I'll gladly chop up any sky texture into the needed patches.

Tetzlaff said:

Are your skies also available as 256x256 or 512x512 skybox textures?

Do you mean as a cuboid style skybox? If so, I have no idea how to make something like that. But since these are free to use, if someone can turn them into skybox textures, then that is totally cool with me.

antares031 said:

Honestly this one is not bad, far from it. Maybe someone can make it better by adding an extra sky texture at the top. That would be a nice skybox for a floating arena above the clouds.

I believe the original stock image for that sky was actually flipped like that. I flipped it so it would look more like heavy hanging clouds (the original was a view from a jet liner flying over clouds, I think). Having the horizon shrink at the bottom of the sky made more sense in an average Doom setting. But it would probably work pretty well for a "floating base" style map if the horizon was pushed more towards the middle of the image (kinda like this). If you would like, I could fiddle around with it a bit and attempt to make a variant like that.

[kb1]

Very very nice, Mechadon! Thanks a bunch - these are fantastic!

[Steve D]

Totally stoked by those awesome green skies, just what I wanted for a couple projects I have in mind. Thanks, Mek, I think I'm set for life! :)