Making a Simple (Parallaxed) Sky — by doomjedi
Step 1 — Concept
Think of a concept for the sky that fits your mod.
Step 2 — Find the right image
Find and download a suitable image from the internet or other games. Try to find skies that already use a Wolf3D-fitting palette.
Step 3 — Resize the image
Resize the image to 64×1024 using any art software. Crop if needed.
- For skies from games that have a more pixelated, non-photographic look — use Nearest Neighbour resizing to preserve the sharpness and pixel style of the image.
- For photographic skies — use Gaussian resizing.
Avoid using MS-Paint for resizing 256-color images (such as skies from old games), as it doesn't do a good job. Use dedicated software instead. Recommended options:
- XNview — http://www.xnview.com/
- IrfanView — http://www.irfanview.com/
Any other capable image editor will also work.
Step 4 — Save as BMP
Save the sky as a BMP image. If you are using MS-Paint, choose the BMP (24-bit color) option — not the "256 colors" option.
Step 5 — Make it horizontally seamless
If the sky is not horizontally tileable, edit it so that the right edge blends into the left edge. Using a sky taken from another game often skips this step, as those are usually already seamless.
Step 6 — Chain images if needed
If the original image doesn't fit the 64×1024 proportions well, you can create a horizontal chain of repeated images — provided the sky is already seamless at this point. This step can also be done after Step 7 instead.
Step 7 — Convert to Wolf3D palette
Open SpriteMaker and convert the sky to the Wolf3D palette.
If the conversion looks bad, try converting to a different 256-color palette first, then recolor it to better-fitting colors for the final conversion. Colors that convert well include:
- Red (best results)
- Orange
- Blue shades
After palette conversion, these can be recolored to any other color range.
Step 8 — Open in MS-Paint and expand the canvas
Open the file in MS-Paint, then expand the canvas width:
Image → Attributes → Width = 1040 (not 1024!)
Step 9 — Separate the sky into 64×64 sections
Starting from the right end of the sky, shift each 64×64 section one step to the right, leaving a single white column of pixels between each section. If you do this correctly, you'll understand why the canvas was set to 1040 instead of 1024 — the extra pixels give you the space needed to separate all the sections cleanly.
This step is designed to minimize copying errors in the next step.
You can save the image at any point during this process.
Step 10 — Extract individual sky frames
Open a second MS-Paint window. From the first image, cut (do not copy) each 64×64 sky frame and paste it into the new window — saving each one as a separate file with a sequential sky frame filename.
Step 11 — Recolor variants (optional)
Use RecolorBMP if you want to create color variants of the sky. Recoloring can produce:
- Evening — orange tones
- Night — black or dark grey
- Rain — grey
- Snow — white
- Morning — yellow
- Day — standard blue
- Hellish — red
Step 12 — Insert into the game
You now have your sky! Insert the frames into the VSWAP file.
To return to the GFX tutorials, click here.