Halo 3 dynamic cubemaps guide

Introduction

Halo 3 introduced a dynamic cubemap system in conjunction with dynamic environment mapping which allows you to place down points in a level where cubemaps should be generated, this allows any objects, and map geometry their shaders to display reflections based on where those cubemap points were placed.

For objects, the cubemap changes depending on which point you're closest to. For level geometry, the cubemap that gets used is determined by which cubemap point is inside of the current cluster.

For shaders to display dynamic cubemaps, you must set the environment_mapping option at the top of the shader tag to dynamic. Otherwise it'll display the default cubemap.

A Covenant environment with cubemaps disabled, no reflections.

A Covenant environment with cubemaps enabled, now showing reflections.

Setup

Placing cubemap points

Cubemap point placement is done through Sapien, to place down points you will need to navigate to Scenario > Structure Data and click on the Cubemaps folder in the Hierarchy view window, once inside you should now be able to right click inside of the Game window and place down cubemap points which will then appear in the Hierarchy view.

A cubemap point which has been placed down.

Cubemap resolution

By default any placed cubemap points will be 16x16 in resolution, but you can change that by clicking the cubemap point in either the Hierarchy view window or the Game window and changing the cubemap resolution option in the Properties palette window.

Higher Resolutions will result in clearer, more visible reflections but will negatively impact the size of the cubemaps bitmap tag and in turn, the compiled cache file.

Generating cubemaps

We can now move on to generating the cubemaps. To do this it's recommended you use Standalone (halo3_tag_test.exe).

If you're generating cubemaps for a multiplayer level, use the following console commands in order:

game_multiplayer slayer
; Replace with the path to your actual .scenario tag WITHOUT the extension:
game_start path\to\scenario\scenario

If you're generating cubemaps for a campaign level, you will only need to run the game_start command using the same format as above.

When you're loaded in the level, open the console and run the following commands:

set terminal_render false
set console_status_string_render false
set events_debug_spam_render false
error_geometry_hide_all

This will ensure that no debug text is visible on screen as those will be visible during cubemap generation which we do not want. Finally, open the console once more and run the cubemap_dynamic_generate command and wait for it to finish.

Importing cubemaps

Making the .bitmap tag

We can now import our cubemaps into a bitmap tag. To do so open a command prompt window in your H3EK install folder and run the tool cubemaps command with the first arguement pointing to your scenario tag (without the .scenario extension) and the second arguements pointing to the cubemaps folder in the root of your H3EK folder like so:

tool cubemaps "path\to\scenario\scenario" "(H3EK Folder)\cubemaps"

Referencing the cubemaps bitmap

After all of that, we can finally reference our cubemaps bitmap to our level. Open your level's scenario tag with Guerilla and look for the Structure BSPs block:

Click on the ... button next to cubemap bitmap group reference and navigate to the folder where your scenario is stored. The cubemaps command we ran earlier should have generated a bitmap tag that includes your scenario's name, the BSP the cubemaps were taken in, and ends with _cubemaps.

For example with a scenario named test and a BSP named 030_030, the bitmap bitmap tag would be test_030_030_cubemaps.bitmap:

If you have multiple BSPs setup in your scenario, make sure to assign the correct cubemaps bitmap to each one.

Fixing highly-compressed cubemaps

Occasionally (and for currently unknown reasons), tool may produce cubemaps that look incredibly low quality, with bad colour compression. See this example:

Horrible compression artifacting.

This can be fixed, but only before cubemap generation.

  1. Before you use the cubemap_dynamic_generate cubemap command, open the debug menu with the Home key.
  2. Press 4 to enter the Graphics sub-menu.
  3. Press 4 to enter the Rasterizer sub-menu.
  4. Use the arrow keys to navigate to the HDR Multiplier (stops) option.
  5. Use the left arrow key to reduce the value of this option to zero.
  6. Now exit out of the debug menu (use Home or End) and continue with the rest of the process as normal.

Once you have finished re-generating and re-importing the cubemaps, they should be much better quality! See the following example:

Note the huge difference in colour quality, especially in the clouds.

End result

After you've completed all steps, you should now have a level setup with dynamic cubemaps!

Masterchief inside of a Covenant environment without dynamic cubemaps setup.

Masterchief inside of a Covenant environment with dynamic cubemaps setup.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to the following individuals for their research or contributions to this topic:

  • J-S (Original discovery of HDR cubemap compression fix)
  • Kashiiera (Writing this guide)
  • PepperMan ("Fixing highly-compressed cubemaps" section)