Rendering Great Skies

[Claudio Branch]

Amazing how technology can change. While we used to use a combination of skydomes for reflection maps, HDR for lighting and various methods for a colour background pass, We now use Vue6 xstream for most skies (and vegetation of course) and integrate with Maya.

 

We've had to create a few scripts inhouse to make this process more plausible but it works well with HDR, making believeable environmental backgrounds and no need to change methods whether outputting to Still or Animated media.

 

Any chance that you can post some examples and perhaps a description of the workflow?

 

I would really like to see some work created with Vue as part of a pipeline.

 

Wireframes, stills, animations, screenshots, ANYTHING...

[Justin Hunt]

Something I found out my mistake, this works ofr mentalray, I dont know if it will work for Vray.

 

If you are using a skydome, instead of using a .jpg use a .tiff with an alpha chanel that totally black. The sky map will sill render but will also so produce an alpha map in the render. Just as if you wern't using a map at all.

 

This way you can have the reflections and be able to composit a different sky if needed.

 

jhv

[gods418]

i have used sitni sati dreamscape for sky it looks ok though even in animations. it might work on viz.but the donwside is it dont work with mental ray or vray. it also includes terrain surface and sea surface.

[archinano]

I use VUE 6 for my skies. It is a great tool. Then I use photoshop for compositing.

 

Jack