Sky problem

# 1 04-10-2006 , 08:54 PM

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Join Date: Apr 2005

Location: Romania

Posts: 192

I don't know if this is the best place to ask this, but I figured it's more a rendering issue than anything else. I was wondering how you can render a plane/sphere/object in general at infinite distance from the camera. For instance, I want to animate a camera (rotation, movement, the works) and I can't use an environment image plane as a sky for the obvious reasons. Nor can i surround it by a sphere as the sky will obviously look wrong, due to the small distance from it. Is there anyway (besides adding a sky in a compositing program) to somehow add a backgorund image plane in post-processing, or render the sky object with infinite distance from the camera?

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# 2 23-11-2006 , 05:53 PM

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Join Date: Sep 2002

Location: Chicagoland USA

Posts: 719

carefull with the word, Infinite. Remember that your system resources have to generate that geometry. Lets see if we can take this apart in steps.

1. Planets are round- so even though you might think that a sphere isnt the best option, it still is. you just have to cut it in half and flatten it out a bit. leave some curvature to run into your horizon.

2. It's special effects, not real world representation- Try working with the idea of compositing your peice together in a third party compositor. Doing this you can keep the enviroment on a small scale and then create hdr images for your lighting or what not. Remember, if you adjust your camera right you can make an object very small look very large without loosing track of your scene. ps. set a second camera up to do this and use your persp cam to veiw the real thing.

3. keep looking at the real thing- while your working on this scene, always have a real photograph of a similar perspective. this will help you with your construction and adjustments within maya.

4. This isnt the only way- keep asking for other peoples opinions and reseach it all until you find one that works for you.

Hope this helped a little.

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# 3 24-11-2006 , 08:49 PM

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Join Date: Oct 2002

Location: London, UK

Posts: 2,800

you can fake it with a few spheres and some texturing.

Create four spheres inside each other and scale them differently. These are going to be your different layers. By using different layers we are going to fake the perspective and give some paralax (this is what we did on the movie "Mrs Henderson Presents" for the big london bombing shots). Now paint some cloud textures for your sky, make sure to use your alpha channels to give transparency. Now when you map these onto your spheres it should start to look a bit better than just having the one sphere. You can also slowly key the rotation in y to give the clouds some movement to enhance the effect.

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Sky problem

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