ADDING SKY TEXTURE TO THE BACKGROUND

[Andrew Mac]

I am trying to add a sky background to my drawing. I am not quite sure what the best way is to accomplish this. What I do is have the drawing in a front view then draw an extruded square/rectangle around the whole drawing and then add the sky/clouds texture to the extruded square. Is there a better wqay to accomplish this?

[Guest]

If you haev VW 10.x, you can use a background image to put a sky in the back.. of course that goes on for eternity, so you'd probably need a ground or extruded rectangle where you didn't want the sky.

The RenderWorks book has information about using the Background command.

[Andrew Mac]

I have version 9.52- how would I achieve this then?

[MikeB]

The best and cleanest way to do this is to export the Rendering as an image file, then add the sky in photoshop.

You can set up a "billboard" of the sky behind your model, but this can get difficult in terms of lighting and then you have to reposition it every time you want to render a different view. I've tried to wrap the whole model with a cylinder befor, but that can cause problems with shadows.

So again, the easiest way to do it out of VW 9 is to export as an image and adjust it in photoshop.

Good Luck

[Peter van der Elst]

You can also use a hemisphere with a sky texture (check marlin studios). When you make the texture, use constant as reflection. The "hemisphere sky" doesn't work if you use direct lights (unless you turn off shadows). This method works quite nice. All the windows are reflecting the sky now as well. Looks good. Maybe rendertime will be a little bit longer, but it's worth it.

[ 07-16-2003, 09:32 AM: Message edited by: Peter van der Elst ]