Using Procedeural Textures for a Sky...

[Claudio Branch]

Has anyone out there tried using a procedural sky texture on a sky dome or box and were the results satisfactory, especially for animation?

 

I would love to see some examples if anyone has something to show.

 

I have a large outdoor environment and the map on my skydome just looks too stretched out!

[AJLynn]

I use procedural skies all the time. The most basic is just a gradient ramp, to get a ramp of blue shades down to a horizon that's lighter or for early or late shots even a bit pink. This also depends on your software - in Cinema4D you can make the gradient turbulent, and I saw a great tutorial on this in Max with mental ray using an inverted sphere dome with a material that has the gradient in the output channel and moving the UVW gizmo up and down to change the time of day, though I can't remember where I saw that. In Vray you can put the same gradient in Max environment and Vray GI environment to get a more interesting lighting.

 

I almost never use crappy sky photos anymore, except for HDRIs.

[vizwhiz]

check This out

 

http://www.jeffpatton.net/Tips/Sky-dome.htm

 

Jeff Patton is "supposedly" coming out with a mr video Tutoral series

 

(holding my breath This should be really good)

 

****

 

ps i got The "rendering with mental ray" book

i ordered it last July 22, 2005 I. M. Patient (not)

 

now what do i do? read it?

 

randy

[AJLynn]

Yeah, that's the one I was thinking of. I really like this one - very elegant solution.

[Ernest Burden III]

Has anyone out there tried using a procedural sky texture on a sky dome or box and were the results satisfactory, especially for animation

 

I have one of those rendering right now. Its a test run, but that's how I've done the sky.

 

I have a gradient for sky/clouds/ground and have added some turbulence which just makes clouds procedurally. Its not like C4Ds new sky/cloud generator which make very realistic clouds, I'm doing something more simple.

 

I should render out just the sky, see how that looks.

 

This one has the procedural turbulence animated a bit:

http://www.oreally.com/temp/proc-skytest01.mov

 

Next turbulence not animated:

http://www.oreally.com/temp/proc-skytest02.mov

 

I wasn't going for fully realistic. Good, 'cause I wouldn't have made it. This is interesting but would work better if done to be much more subtle, just variations in a sky. It has some mapping projection issues and also managed to see a seam. That's no good. About 46MB, by the way.

[Claudio Branch]

Thanks for the information...I especially like the Mental Ray tutorial.

 

On the same topic, is anyone familiar with displacement handling optimization when using procedurals in animations?

[tcorbett]

Here are some screenshots from an animation that had to be produced quickly. If I remember correctly, the sky was a multi-mix of a star field (twilight purple gradient to cellular with VERY tiny cells) and a sunset gradient with lots of turbulance. The end result turned out to be nice.

[pixelperfectg]

Thanks for the information...I especially like the Mental Ray tutorial.

Cool, glad it was useful.

You should also check out Pete Draper's site. He has many VERY helpful tutorials that might be of use to you as well. Here's a link to his tutorial page:

http://www.xenomorphic.co.uk/education.htm

Jeff

[Claudio Branch]

Well, thanks yet again...Peter Draper's site has several things of interest!