I was looking at Ozone 3.0 on e-onsoftware and thinking, “it’s a shame Blender doesn’t have something like that.” Isn’t there anyway to create atmospheres in Blender to some significant level of realism? Or are photos always gonna be the standard?
One of the google-summer-of-code projects was to add a sky generator. Don’t know what became of it, but it’s probably not as advanced as Ozone. Terragen also generates some really cool atmosphere images.
That said, this type of stuff is usually composited in later on down the pipeline. So it’s usually easier to have the sky as a matte or, for moving scenes, to be generated in a separate application the specializes in this type of thing.
That being said, have a play around with adding a cloud textures to the world settings in different ways. It’s not anywhere as powerful as Terragen or Bryce for creating realistic skies, but it can produce some kind of nice results!
This took about 4 minutes to cobble together:
Yeah, but I never familiarized myself whith how to create 360 degree sky maps. How do you do that anyway? I don’t know where I’d find tutorials on that.
Come to think of it, now that blender supports 360 sphere maps, I can easily create sky maps in bryce using reflective spheres. I still don’t know how I’d create maps in Terragen though.
I still don’t know how I’d create maps in Terragen though.
You have to render it just using the sky (turn off the landscape generation) and make 6 rendering with a 90 degree field of view: front, back, left right, up, down. You then have to stitch them together into a 360 degree image using something like pano tools. http://webuser.fh-furtwangen.de/~dersch/
There are always distortion problems when doing it that way though. It’s never as good as it could be if terragen would render directly to a panoramic image like blender can. It will be quite interesting to see what terragen2 will be like (if they ever get finished with it)
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Hey, just a thought (From someone who hasn’t looked at Terragen for years!) Can you create a mirrored sphere in Terragen and shoot down from directly above it? or… can you set a 180° field of view and point straight up?
Nope, no mirrored spheres. The other idea might work, but I don’t no if you’d have full 180 degrees. And I’m not sure you’d be able to map such an image on a background either.
Well, maybe you could use ter2blend, and use a sphere from Blender to mirror a terragen evironment. Or maybe use another program. I haven’t work with those scripts, though. You’d have to try it out.
I have used Bryce to create the sky I wanted and then painted it onto hemi-cylinder. It worked very well. I used the final result in my T-Wing image. Would be nice if someday Blender had an actual atmosphere generator.
There is a teragen script that sets up the camera to make the six images and a few panorama makers that are free and will allow you to map the 6 images in various ways to use as sky maps. I dont have any links right now but I may post some if I find them. Use Google and I bet you will find some thing. One thing I havent been able to find is a image editor that will work with .hdr files that teragen makes(with a plugin). If I could find one you could make some sweet 360 hdri.
i heard some 2.43 rumors using HDR files…
shrk1: I guess Hdrshop would be the program of your choice. You can download a “not-for-commercial-use” version1 of the website. http://gl.ict.usc.edu/HDRShop/
.krizu
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