Although some terms and stills are taken from 3ds Max software, the principles and techniques presented in this tutorial should be applicable to most 3D software packages.
The tutorial assumes basic knowledge of 3ds Max. Use the excellent 3ds Max online help file if you are unsure about the more detailed aspects of the tuturial.
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In this tutorial I will show you how to make some simple skies with procedural clouds. They're not photoreal, but they look very nice and are easy to tweak and adjust. The clouds will be 3D, so they can animate and have perspective. But they will not be volumetric, so you cannot fly through them.
The method is very simple, and can be expanded on as much as you want. We will create hemispheres that represent the sky and the different layers of clouds. Using a combination of gradients and noise textures, we will then create opacity mapped clouds. And using some material and texture instancing, we will create a sky that's very easy to change.
Let's start!
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Start by making a single sphere. Make it rather large, this is the sky after all. Convert the sphere to a polyobject, then delete the lower half. We will be inside these hemispheres, so we need normals that point inwards. Select all the faces and flip their normals. Now put two UVW mapping sets on this hemisphere. Make the first a planar mapping from the top, set it to Map Channel 1. Make the second a planar mapping from the side, and set it to Map Channel 2. Make sure both UVW sets fit the sphere tightly.
Duplicate this sphere to get two additional spheres, scale the copies down in height so that they are 25% as tall as the original. Make one of the copies slightly lower than the other. These two flattened hemispheres will be our cloud layers. Name the original hemisphere 'hemiSky'. Name the tallest of the copies 'hemiBrightClouds', and the lowest 'hemiShadowClouds'.
Now create a camera, place it on the ground in the center of the hemispheres. Make sure that the camera is pointing out toward the hemispheres. Put a rather wide lens on the camera, so that we can see the sky proper. I set my camera to a 20mm lens, equal to around 90 degree of diagonal FOV on 35mm film. Make a test render to make sure that the camera see the hemispheres and that their normals are pointing inwards.
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