skydome for an animation walkthrough

[chow choppe]

Hi everyone

 

i am working on an animation after a very long time so i have forgotten a few things that i used to do. i want to know whats the best way to put sky in the animation. using skydome? where can i buy good textures for the skydome? second is environment mapping set to spherical but i have vray sky in my environment and background slot so i cant use this method. i just want to use a sky image as a background but use vray sky for lighting. so i am trying to use skydome set just to visible to reflections but i am not able to get a good sky out of it. either the texture looks too big or i dont see enough of cloud areas in it(just plain blue gradient in maximum areas. thats why i asked for better panoramic textures maybe?

also one of my friends told me that you can render out animation and put sky later in After effects. but i know how do u do that. any suggestions.

just want to know what people are using these days as i am working on an animation project after a very long time. and i am out of touch regarding these. please give inputs

 

Thanks in advance

[datacrasher]

i don't use Vray i usally use the physical sky in the metal ray and bring the physical sky into the material editor and brighten that up then assign it to the half sphere and and a shell modifer.

 

To animatie it i would then use the daylight system to turn day into night but this i don't think would affect the sky dome

[chow choppe]

i don't use Vray i usally use the physical sky in the metal ray and bring the physical sky into the material editor and brighten that up then assign it to the half sphere and and a shell modifer.

 

To animatie it i would then use the daylight system to turn day into night but this i don't think would affect the sky dome

 

thanks but that was not my query. i can use vryay also to achieve what u r saying. my point is tha i dont want to use physical vray sky in the background but a nice panoramic bitmap of a sky. i just want to use vray sky for GI and sky bitmap for background

[datacrasher]

okay then there is a lot of sky texture online i like the ones by jeff patton http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=jeff+patton+sky&gs_sm=e&gs_upl=25053l25671l0l26617l4l4l0l0l0l0l213l706l0.2.2l4l0&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.r_cp.,cf.osb&biw=1024&bih=604&um=1&ie=UTF-8&tbm=isch&source=og&sa=N&tab=wi&ei=eYMVT6jJApS38QPws4CBBA#um=1&hl=en&tbm=isch&sa=1&q=+sky&pbx=1&oq=+sky&aq=f&aqi=g10&aql=&gs_sm=e&gs_upl=5688l5688l0l6719l1l1l0l0l0l0l110l110l0.1l1l0&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.r_cp.,cf.osb&fp=c251d26689658162&biw=1024&bih=604

Edited January 17, 2012 by datacrasher

[subburb]

hello, i would suggest Peter Guthrie's ressources (HDRIs) and tutos.

http://www.peterguthrie.net/blog/2010/02/hdri-sky-lighting-tutorial/

http://www.peterguthrie.net/blog/2010/03/hdri-skies-shop/

[Claudio Branch]

 

one of my friends told me that you can render out animation and put sky later in After effects. but i know how do u do that.

 

 

Save out your rendering as a .png

[Corey Beaulieu]

In after effects you can use a plug in called horizon. Its not free but its great if you do a lot of this sort of thing. You have a lot more control in placing sky features. You export a camera null into ae and horizon reads it to track any image into your scene. Just make sure to save an alpha channel.

 

You can place your sky in a max scene like you want it just takes rotating the image and test renders to get it in the right place. This way is much faster:

 

http://www.redgiantsoftware.com/products/all/trapcode-horizon/