Blue skies

[Jack Fulmer]

You could try to create a GIANT cylinder around the building and then apply a sky texture to it (I believe there are a few different sky texture/shader options within the Lightworks interface).

I've done this before with mixed results. Directional lights can create glare and, of course, unwanted shadows. Shadows can be eliminated via the Object info palette, but glare is another story.

Good Luck.

[RBKarcht]

I may be missing something, so I wanted to check this out. I am examining methods for adding a blue sky with clouds to a rendering and am not coming up with many options. Specifically, I need a stationary sky background of some type to use for the generation of a movie around the building exterior. What options do I have? Thanks.

[Erich]

Backgrounds aint easy. After reading your note, I decided to try to accomplish it. The result is at

http://www.tiac.net/users/hfp/house/

The way it was done:

A ?View? layer is created for layer linking of those to be seen in the rendering.

After much fooling around finding the right viewing position, save the view. Really a time-saver.

Now for the background:

Flip View layer to Top Plan. Create a giant circular wall. This one was about 150? radius, 150? high.

Create a texture for the wall:

I robbed a sky jpg image from the internet, loaded it into Photoshop and fooled around by enlarging it to approximately full height for the VW drawing, and blurring to make it look decent.

Open a new VW drawing. Import the new Sky.jpg image into the new drawing.

One of the 2D tree images was used from the VW symbol library. Copy it a hundred times across the bottom of the sky.

Group everything and mirror as many times in width as necessary to match the round wall circumference.

Export the resulting image in .jgp format.

Go to the VW View layer with the round wall and open the Resources Menu. Select New, Texture. Open the Sky.jpg image from the file, name it, and now you are only about three hours away from being done!

Select the round wall, hit the texture tab on the Object Menu (check whether it?s going to be on the right, middle, or left side).

Go to the Object Menu and hit Mapping, to see what it (might) look like.

Now, if you have a light source, click on it. In the Object Menu, make sure it?s a Point Source, with no distance fall-off. Amazingly enough, the Directional light that defaults when you set the sun position will not work with this wall as a background, unless the sun?s elevation is above the wall height. If you create a semicircular wall to let the sun in, this will work, but the wall will have shading on it. Also, if you create animation, your world (background) will have a giant hole in it.

Then go to the Saved view and let RW do it?s thing. The rendering shown in the example above took many attempts to get everything right, or as right as it shows in the picture. It only took about six hours, but this is maybe typical for a first attempt. Now, I have a stock background that can be plopped into any drawing.

[MikeB]

We've messed around with this and finally gave up. Our standard procedure now is to render with the background set to black (I found things render better with a black background??????????), and then export the rendering as an image file.

Then we open the image in Photoshop and select the black background, delete it and insert one of several sky pics we have on file. It works great and VW dosent have to render the sky itself. You can change the color or the entire sky is seconds. We also use Photoshop to add people, trees, context. etc. We really only use VW for the building.

If we want the sky to reflect in the windows of the model we set up a billboard out of the view. set it far enough back that it wont interfer with the shadows from the directional light, and then light it seperately with spots.

Good Luck. And really there are a thousand ways to do this you just need to find the one that works for you.