Right now if we select the camera viewpoint (NUMPAD 0) our scene should look like this.
In the lower part of the 3D window, left-click in the button shown in the picture (the one with the little Earth icon).
by Malefico
Is it possible to achieve realistic skies in Blender ? Of course it is. There are several tutorials available in the web about it. There the approach is as following: the sky is modelled by splashing a sphere and adding an appropiate texture (eg: a picture of the sky). Then the whole scene is modelled within this sphere. This is OK although if the camera goes near the scene's border it will eventually crash the sky as Jim Carrey in The Truman Show. This is what I called the "Truman Effect".
I don't have anything against this approach, but I hink Blender can solve the problem in a slightly more elegant and powerful way: the "World".
In this mini-tutorial we are going to set a realistic sky in a Blender scene by using the basic Blender's World options. Are you ready ?
Let's start by runningo Blender and scaling up the default plane with the S key. Then we'll create a cube by pressing SPACEBAR ->ADD ->MESH ->CUBE and we'll place it over the plane as if it were the floor of our scene. The camera should be over the plane, as close to the cube as we wanted it to be. We'll complete the scene by adding a lamp with the sequence SPACEBAR ->ADD ->LAMP and placing it in a suitable site to light the whole set.
Right now if we select the camera viewpoint (NUMPAD 0) our scene should look like this. |
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In the lower part of the 3D window, left-click in the button shown in the picture (the one with the little Earth icon). |
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Now left-click in the litle button with the white square to create a &Brave New World". Before our eyes the Blender's World options are spread:
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The first thing we'll do is to load a pretty sky texture. I recommend the excellent textures available at Blender Café. To do this, left-click in the texture button adn choose IMAGE->LOAD IMAGE.
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Back to World. Let's check out the controls to the left. We have three buttons labeled: BLEND, REAL and PAPER. These buttons control the way Blender applies the textures we chose to the World we have just created. For now we're agoing to activate the REAL button. In this mode Blender uses the texture to paint 180 degrees of the horizon and completes the rest with the same texture but flipped in the X axis to give the illusion of a real landscape. |
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In the right part there is a group of button we should set. For this example we'll choose HORI. The other buttons BLEND, ZENUP y ZENDO, will let us achieve very interesting FX later. |
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The texture can be adjusted to show or hide certain areas by means of the SizeX, SizeY, SizeZ controls and the dX,dY, dZ controls in the central part of the options panel. For this particular texture I chose, the preferred values are as shown in the picture, but of course you can set them any way you like it better. |
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negative values for dX and dY shift the texture to the right and down, and positive values shift it to the left and up. Anyone who knows where dZ shifts to, please let me know ;). By changing the Size values you can stretch or squeeze the texture following your personal preferences. |
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Well that's all for now. Do your own experiments and don't be afraid of playing a little with the other options. I'm sure you'll do fantastic skies with this !. We'll make some interesting FX in the next part of this tutorial. See you soon !
