GOOD LOOKING SKIES FROM PROCEDURAL TEXTURES Click here to go back to part 2 of this tutorial... Instancing materials and the final scene Thanks for staying with me this far. If you do a render now, everything should look quite nice. But we need to add fog to each hemisphere for the final bit of realism. This fog will be instanced through blend materials, so that we can easily adjust the fog colour if we need to. In the material editor, select the 'matSky' material. Click inside the material type, where it says 'Standard'. Change the material to a 'Blend' material, keeping the original material as a sub-material. You now have a blend material with 'matSky' inside the first material slot, name the blend material 'blendSky'. Put our 'matFog' material into the second slot, either by dragging it there or picking it from the material editor. Make sure you are creating an instance this time, by selecting instance inside this box: We need a mask to transition from the sky to the fog material. Click inside the 'Mask' slot and create a new gradient map, then name this ramp 'maskFog'. Edit the map to match the screengrab below. I added a key almost at the end of the gradient, and set it to black. Rotate the gradient by 90 degrees in the W channel to orient it properly, and set its UV 'Map Channel' to 2. The white part of this gradient will decide where the fog goes. Also, set the texture 'U Tiling' to 0.99 and turn off the 'U Tile' checkbox, then we don't get the bottom of the fog repeating at the top of our sky. Then we do the same for the other two materials, 'matBrightClouds' and 'matShadowClouds', creating blend materials with instances of 'matFog' as the second material and instances of 'maskFog' as the mask texture. Now there should be three blend materials in the scene, arranged like this: 'blendSky' with 'matSky' as material 1, an instance of 'matFog' as material 2, and an instance of 'maskFog' as the mask. 'blendBrightClouds' with 'matBrightClouds' as material 1, an instance of 'matFog' as material 2, and an instance of 'maskFog' as the mask. 'blendShadowClouds' with 'matShadowClouds' as material 1, an instance of 'matFog' as material 2, and an instance of 'maskFog' as the mask. And you should be done! If you do a render now, the finished image should look something like this: Not too shabby I would say! And since everything is procedural and instanced, it's very easy to make changes and create a whole range of different skies. Finally, let's take a quick look at what we can do to make this sky even more flexible and better looking. Taking thigns further There are plenty of things we could do to improve this setup. Using a flat plane we could add a sun between the sky gradient and the clouds layers. By combining custom parameters with wiring or expression controllers, we could set up a system for animating the clouds. By animating the U and V offset values, and subtly animating the phase of the noise textures, we could make the clouds appear to drift across the sky. Also, we could control the output curves with custom parameters to easily adjust the thickness of the clouds, the scale and the amount of clouds and so on... Quite a lot of fun stuff to do if you want! Of course, I have made a slightly more advanced cloud system, that includes all the additions I suggested above. I have set up six different types of skies, ranging from a blue caribbean sky, a colourful sunset, to a sombre rain filled sky. I had this cloud pack for sale at Turbo Squid for a while, but to celebrate my mention in this Zoo Keeper tutorial video I am now giving it away for free. Click the link below to download the full Procedural Skies Pack. And if you like them and find them useful, why not donate a dollar or two. That way you will help finance more tutorials like this. Thanks :) Click here to download version 1 of the Procedural Skies Pack. All the images on this website are (c) copyrighted Rune Spaans and their respective owners. Any use of the materials on this site other than for private, non-commercial viewing purposes is strictly prohibited. If you want to use some of these images for promotional or editorial reasons, please contact me.