Skies Tutorial

Here's a method I'd like to share to create skies with a differerent 'look' and 'feel' to the usual Brycean sky. There must be an almost endless variety of effects using this technique, so consider this more of a starting point for your own explorations.

'Moonshine'

'Late Afternoon'

The two examples above show the final effect. Both images are basically the same sky as you will see if you closely look at the shapes of the clouds in the centre of each image.

Note: although the screenshots in the tutorial are
Bryce3D you can still get similar results using Bryce2 and of course Bryce4

Here is a summary of the method

1. Start with a blank scene, render and save a nice sky.

2. Now with another blank scene,

i Create a terrain
ii Apply the sky rendered in step 1 as the g2h map
iii Again with the sky from step 1 apply it as the material to the terrain.

3. Rotate the terrain 90 degrees scale and position as required.

i Set up lighting to illuminate terrain.
ii Save scene, merge this into your main scene when needed.

Fire up Bryce and set up your document size to be somewhere near the size of your final render ( I find 800x600 a useable size).

Select the default groundplane and delete it.

Uncheck 'Link Sun to View'.

Change the camera field of view (FOV) to a fairly wide angle, 160 works well, some cloud formations may give too much distortion to the nearest clouds, experimentation is the key.

With a now completely empty scene move the camera until the horizon line is just on or below the bottom edge of your screen. This will give a classic wide-angle sky and also conveniently eliminate the horizon line.

First thing is to render an initial sky, this will be the template on which the final sky is based, so take your time and aim to get some nicely spaced and sized cumulous looking clouds near the foreground. You may find it helpfull to start with one of the preset skies and then tweak away until you get something you like. As we are using a wide angle of view and pointing the camera upwards you should be able to achieve a dramatic looking sky.

This is the render on which the 2 examples above are based. The initial sky preset used for this was 'Wisp o the Will'.

Save this scene as your 'skytemplate', we are only interested in the bitmap from this scene, (which will be used in the next stage), but it is also handy to keep the scene file for future use.

On to Part 2